Fellow traveler

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A fellow traveler is a person who sympathizes with the beliefs of a particular organization, but does not belong to that organization. The phrase must be understood as referring to people who "walk part of the way" with an organization, without committing themselves to it. The term is most often applied to a sympathizer of Communism, or particular Communist states such as the Soviet Union, who is nonetheless not a "card-carrying member" of a Communist Party.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the term "fellow traveler" was sometimes applied to Russian writers who accepted the revolution's ends but were not active participants. Some writers were able during the relatively liberal era of the New Economic Policy to write on subjects in the manner of their choosing, but during various periods of repressions that followed, particularly after the ascendency of Joseph Stalin, many found their position difficult. Some emigrated when the authorities refused to allow publication of anti-regime works, while others ceased writing altogether, sometimes coerced into doing so. A prominent example of the literary fellow travelers is Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita.

In Europe, the term was used to describe those who, without being Communist Party members of their respective countries, had Communist sympathies, and sometimes acted in close connection with the Comintern and the Soviet regime: attending communist meetings, writing in communist journals, and even fighting alongside communists in Spain (in the 1930s), Greece, Yugoslavia (in the late 1940s), and Latin America (in the 1950s and 1960s). Many journalists, intellectuals and artists have been described (and sometimes referred to themselves) as fellow travelers, among them André Gide, André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, Romain Rolland, Jean-Paul Sartre and Martha Gellhorn.

In the United States, the term has long been used to describe those who were linked, or accused of having links with, Communists. Partly because of political controversies surrounding the subject, the term is in this context often used as or considered to be a political pejorative.