fellow travelers (poputchiki)

Etymology and definition

The Russian word poputchik means literally 'one who travels the same path'. In the years after the October Revolution of 1917 it carried no negative connotation and denoted writers and artists sympathetic to the Bolsheviks who were not members of the party. The term is usually attributed to the People's Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky; from 1923 Leon Trotsky used it widely, first applying it to the work of the Serapion Fraternity and then elaborating it in Literature and Revolution.

Trotsky's definition

Trotsky placed the poputchiki in a 'transitional art', created between bourgeois art and an art of the Revolution that was still unborn. He named Boris Pilnyak, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nikolai Tikhonov, the Serapion Fraternity, Yesenin and his group of Imagists and, to some extent, Kliuev: writers impossible without the Revolution who nevertheless did not grasp it as a whole and for whom the communist ideal remained foreign, since they were inclined to look toward the peasantry rather than the worker. They were, he wrote, 'not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her artist fellow-travellers'. About a fellow traveller, he added, the question always arises: how far will he go? The answer depended less on personal qualities than on the objective trend of the coming decade.

The debates of 1924

The 1920s saw sharp polemics over the future of Soviet art. The All-Russian Union of Writers, grouped around Alexander Voronsky's journal Krasnaya Nov, faced VAPP, whose journal Na Postu was published under the ideological guidance of Leopold Averbakh. When the VAPP group claimed for itself the role of sole spokesman for party policy, the Press Department of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) convened a meeting on 9 May 1924. On the eve of the meeting a group of fellow-traveller writers sent the Central Committee a letter declaring that the paths of contemporary Russian literature were bound up with those of post-October Soviet Russia. It was signed by thirty writers, among them Valentin Katayev, Pilnyak, Yesenin, Mandelstam, Babel, Aleksei Tolstoy, Prishvin, Zoshchenko, Kaverin and Vsevolod Ivanov. At the meeting Voronsky said that the party did not adopt the standpoint of any single tendency but assisted all revolutionary literary groupings, carefully straightening their line, while Trotsky defined a fellow traveller as one who, 'limping and staggering', walks part of the way along the road the Bolsheviks travel further, and added that 'the good of the revolution is for us the highest law'.

The 1925 resolution and literary policy

The Politburo resolution of 18 June 1925, 'On the Party's Policy in the Sphere of Fiction', devoted a separate point to 'the so-called fellow travellers', noting their differentiation, the importance of many of them as qualified 'specialists' of literary technique and the wavering among them, and directing tactful and careful treatment aimed at creating the conditions for their earliest possible passage to communist ideology. The resolution divided writers into peasant, fellow-traveller and proletarian categories, stated that the party supported all detachments of Soviet writers and warned against communist conceit and against a contemptuous attitude toward the old cultural heritage or toward 'specialists of the artistic word'. It was precisely here that the Proletkult-style outlook Voronsky criticized diverged from the resolution. In April 1932 the resolution 'On the Reorganization of Literary and Artistic Organizations' dissolved all literary groups and created the single Union of Soviet Writers, and the category of fellow traveller disappeared with them.

The lists and the aftermath

Among those classified as fellow travellers were Pilnyak, Mandelstam, Babel and Klyuev, all of whom were victims of the Great Terror of 1937–1938; of the 593 writers who took part in the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, more than two hundred were later arrested. The list of typical poputchiki differs from source to source: accounts of 1920s literature usually name Pilnyak, Prishvin, Pasternak, Babel, Leonov, Paustovsky and the Serapion Fraternity.

Extension in English

In the English-speaking world of the 1930s to the 1950s, 'fellow traveller' became a pejorative for people who sympathized with communism or with the Soviet bloc without being members of a communist party. Within the Soviet Union the word disappeared from political discourse in the Stalin era, while the West adopted the English expression to identify sympathizers with communism. Jean-Paul Sartre described himself as a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party.