The Fellow Travellers

Who Were the Fellow Travellers?

The term “Fellow Traveller” — a translation of the Russian poputchik — was originally used by Trotsky to describe writers who sympathised with the revolution without being full Bolsheviks. By the late 1920s and 1930s, however, it had come to describe something more troubling: Western intellectuals, journalists, politicians and public figures who visited Stalin’s Soviet Union, were shown a carefully curated version of Soviet life, and returned home to write enthusiastic endorsements of the regime. Some of the most celebrated minds of the age lent their names and reputations to a system that was, at the very moment they were praising it, murdering hundreds of thousands of people and reducing millions more to slave labour in the Gulag.

Understanding why they did this is one of the most uncomfortable intellectual puzzles of the twentieth century. It requires taking seriously the proposition that intelligent, educated people can be systematically deceived — and that they sometimes want to be.

The Soviet Propaganda Machine for Foreign Visitors

The Soviet state understood from early on the propaganda value of sympathetic foreign opinion. From the 1920s onwards, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (known by its Russian acronym VOKS) coordinated visits by Western intellectuals, ensuring that everything they saw was carefully managed. Visitors were met at the border by attentive guides, housed in well-appointed hotels, taken to model factories, collective farms and schools, and introduced to articulate Soviet citizens who spoke warmly of the new society being built around them.

What they were not shown was far more significant. The Gulag, which by the early 1930s held hundreds of thousands of prisoners in conditions of brutal forced labour, was invisible to tourists. The artificially created Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 — the Holodomor — in which millions starved to death as the state seized grain from the countryside, was actively concealed from foreign correspondents and visitors alike. The Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who travelled through Ukraine in 1933 and reported honestly on the famine, was immediately attacked in the Western press by Soviet sympathisers. Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who denied the famine was occurring while privately acknowledging its reality to British diplomats, won a Pulitzer Prize. For an examination of how Pravda functioned as a propaganda instrument during the Terror, see our in-depth article on the Soviet press in 1937.

Why Did They Believe?

The Fellow Travellers were not, for the most part, stupid people. Many were brilliant. The explanation for their credulity lies less in individual intellectual failure than in the broader context of the 1930s. The Great Depression had shattered confidence in liberal capitalism. Mass unemployment, breadlines and the rise of fascism in Europe made the Soviet experiment seem, to many on the left, like the only coherent alternative. When Sidney and Beatrice Webb — the founders of the London School of Economics and among the most respected social reformers of their generation — visited the USSR in 1932 and produced their vast, admiring study Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, they were expressing a widely felt need to believe that somewhere, a rational and humane alternative to capitalism was being built.

There was also a powerful element of motivated reasoning. For those who had publicly praised the Soviet experiment, acknowledging its crimes meant acknowledging that they had been wrong — not just factually wrong, but morally wrong in ways that had provided propaganda cover for mass murder. The psychological cost of that admission was enormous. It was easier to dismiss reports of famine and terror as anti-Soviet propaganda put about by class enemies and reactionaries.

The show trials of 1936–38, in which old Bolsheviks confessed to lurid crimes they had not committed and were then executed, should have been the moment when the Fellow Travellers’ faith collapsed. For some it was. But many found ways to rationalise what they had seen. The distinguished American philosopher John Dewey chaired an independent commission that found Trotsky innocent of the charges against him, but Dewey’s findings were dismissed or ignored by large sections of the Western left. Understanding the full machinery of Stalin’s Five Year Plans and the Soviet state helps explain why so many in the West found it plausible that rapid industrialisation was being achieved without systematic terror.

The Legacy of the Fellow Travellers

The Fellow Traveller phenomenon did not end with the 1930s. The pattern of Western intellectuals finding reasons to excuse or minimise the crimes of regimes that offered an alternative to Western capitalism repeated itself throughout the Cold War — in responses to Mao’s China, to Cuba, to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. What the original Fellow Travellers bequeathed to later generations was not just a set of specific errors but a template for how ideological commitment can override the plain evidence of the senses.

The historian David Caute’s exhaustive study The Fellow Travellers (1973) documented the sheer scale of Western intellectual complicity with Stalinism. What emerges from his account is not a portrait of villains but of people whose genuine idealism — their hatred of poverty, racism, fascism and inequality — was weaponised against their capacity for honest judgement. That is, in some ways, the most disturbing conclusion of all.

Why It Matters Now

The Fellow Travellers raise questions that remain urgently relevant: how do we maintain critical distance from political movements we sympathise with? How do media organisations and intellectuals resist the temptation to suppress inconvenient truths in service of a larger narrative? And what responsibility do public intellectuals bear when their endorsements provide legitimacy to authoritarian regimes? In an age of information abundance and ideological polarisation, the mechanisms of self-deception that made the Fellow Travellers possible are, if anything, more sophisticated and harder to resist than they were in the 1930s.

Key Figures

• Sidney and Beatrice Webb — Founders of the Fabian Society and the LSE, whose 1935 book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? became the most influential Fellow Traveller text in English.
• Walter Duranty — New York Times Moscow correspondent who denied the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 while privately acknowledging it to diplomats. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.
• Gareth Jones — Welsh journalist who accurately reported the famine in 1933 and was attacked by Duranty and other pro-Soviet journalists for doing so.
• George Bernard Shaw — Irish playwright who visited the USSR in 1931 and returned to praise Stalin enthusiastically, dismissing reports of suffering as capitalist propaganda.
• Lion Feuchtwanger — German novelist who attended the 1937 show trials and wrote a book defending their legitimacy, Moscow 1937, despite the obvious impossibility of the confessions.

Timeline

Listen to more episodes on this period: Best Podcasts on Stalin and the Soviet Union | Best Podcasts on the Russian Revolution