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 GulagGulag Full Description:The government agency that administered the vast network of forced labor camps. Far more than just a prison system, it was a central component of the Soviet economy, using slave labor to extract resources from the most inhospitable regions of the country. The Gulag system institutionalized political repression. Millions of “enemies of the people”—ranging from political dissidents and intellectuals to petty criminals—were arrested and transported to camps to work in mining, timber, and construction. Critical Perspective:Critically, the Gulag was an economic necessity for the Stalinist system. The “Economic Miracle” of the Soviet Union relied heavily on this reservoir of unpaid, coerced labor to complete dangerous infrastructure projects that free labor would not undertake. It signifies the ultimate reduction of the human being to a unit of production, to be worked until exhaustion and then replaced.
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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 HolodomorHolodomor Short Description (Excerpt):The man-made terror-famine of 1932–1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. While famine affected other parts of the USSR, in Ukraine it was engineered by the state through impossible grain quotas and the closure of borders to prevent starving peasants from seeking food. Full Description:Holodomor (meaning “death by hunger”) represents the darkest consequence of collectivization. When Ukrainian peasants failed to meet grain procurement quotas, the state seized all food stocks, blocked villages, and criminalized the possession of even a few stalks of wheat (“The Law of Spikelets”). Critical Perspective:Historians increasingly view this not merely as a policy failure, but as an act of genocide designed to crush Ukrainian nationalism. Stalin feared that a rebellious Ukraine could destabilize the Soviet Union. Hunger was weaponized to break the spirit of the peasantry and destroy the social basis of Ukrainian independence.
Read more — 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 DepressionGreat Depression The global economic collapse that began with the US stock market crash of October 1929 and deepened through bank failures, trade collapse, and mass unemployment to produce the worst economic crisis of the twentieth century. By 1932, a quarter of American workers were unemployed; industrial production had fallen by half. The Great Depression began not with a single event but with a series of interconnected collapses. The October 1929 stock market crash wiped out speculative fortunes but would not, alone, have produced a decade-long depression; the depression was deepened by bank failures that wiped out the savings of ordinary Americans, by the Federal Reserve’s contractionary monetary policy that reduced the money supply, by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 that triggered retaliatory trade barriers worldwide, and by the gold standard constraints that prevented governments from expanding their monetary supplies in response to the crisis. By 1932–33, a quarter of American workers were unemployed, industrial production had fallen by fifty percent, and the banking system had effectively ceased to function. The international dimension was crucial: Germany’s reparations obligations and war debt structure, financed by American loans, made the German economy uniquely vulnerable to the credit contraction. The Depression contributed directly to Hitler’s electoral rise — the Nazi Party gained over 37% of the vote in July 1932 in conditions of mass unemployment and national humiliation. The policy responses — Roosevelt’s New Deal, Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard, the various autarkic nationalisms of the 1930s — produced partial recovery in some countries while deepening the crisis in others. Full recovery required the Second World War’s military spending to restore full employment. The Great Depression was not a natural disaster but a political-economic failure: decisions made by governments, central banks, and financial institutions that could have been made differently. Keynes’s analysis — that the depression reflected a collapse of effective demand that markets could not self-correct without government intervention — was substantially correct, but politically unacceptable to the orthodoxies of the 1930s. The lasting significance of the Depression is not economic but political: it demonstrated that sustained mass unemployment was politically uncontainable, that democracies unable to provide economic security were vulnerable to authoritarian alternatives, and that the international economic system required political management that pure market mechanisms could not supply. The post-war Bretton Woods system — managed exchange rates, capital controls, the IMF and World Bank — was designed precisely to prevent a recurrence by building the international economic management mechanisms that had been absent in the 1930s. 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 WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War had fully ended: American and Soviet disagreements over the post-war order in Europe were visible at Yalta in February 1945 and had hardened into open confrontation by 1947, when the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion and the Marshall Plan began binding Western Europe to American economic leadership. The term itself was popularised by journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947, capturing the essential quality of a conflict that neither side could allow to become hot — because both possessed nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the other’s cities. The resulting stalemate was managed through deterrence, alliance systems (NATO in the West, the Warsaw Pact in the East), and the deliberate avoidance of direct superpower confrontation even while both sides fought intense proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and dozens of other theatres. The Cold War was simultaneously a strategic competition and an ideological one: each side claimed to represent the future of humanity, and each used development aid, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and covert action to advance its model in the non-aligned world. It ended not with a military defeat but with the internal collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. The Cold War’s most important characteristic was its globality: what began as a European dispute about occupation zones became a worldwide competition that shaped the politics of every continent. For the United States, it justified interventions that overthrew democratic governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) on the grounds that any leftist government was a Soviet beachhead; for the Soviet Union, it justified the crushing of reform movements within its own bloc (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) on the grounds that any deviation threatened the socialist camp. The Cold War’s legacy is therefore not only the fall of the Berlin Wall but the long list of democracies destroyed, developmental alternatives foreclosed, and civil wars fuelled in the name of containing the other side. The Third World paid the price for a confrontation between two powers that never actually fought each other. — in responses to Mao’s China, to Cuba, to Cambodia under the Khmer RougeKhmer Rouge khmer-rouge The Cambodian communist movement that seized power in 1975 and governed Cambodia until 1979, implementing a radical agrarian utopia that emptied the cities, abolished money, and killed between 1.5 and 2 million people — between 20 and 25 percent of Cambodia’s entire population. The Khmer Rouge — Red Khmers — under Pol Pot came to power on 17 April 1975, two weeks before the fall of Saigon. Their revolution was the most radical attempt at total social transformation in the twentieth century: within days of taking Phnom Penh, they forced the entire urban population — including hospitals full of patients — into the countryside to work as agricultural labourers in a vast forced collectivisation. Year Zero had been declared: the calendar was reset, cities were emptied, money abolished, family ties severed, religious practice outlawed, and a regime of total surveillance and denunciation imposed on the country. The killing proceeded through multiple mechanisms: execution of the educated, the former military, and urban professionals; death from starvation and overwork in the agricultural camps; torture and execution of suspected enemies at the S-21 detention centre in Phnom Penh; and periodic purges of the regime’s own cadres consumed by paranoia. The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, which ended the Khmer Rouge’s national rule in January 1979, was not an international humanitarian intervention but a Vietnamese strategic decision — the Khmer Rouge had been conducting cross-border raids into Vietnam — that had the incidental effect of stopping the genocide. A Khmer Rouge remnant continued armed resistance from the Thai border until 1999. The Khmer Rouge presents history with a particular horror: the genocide was carried out not by a right-wing authoritarian regime claiming racial superiority but by a movement of university-educated Maoist idealists, many of them trained in France, who believed they were building a peasant utopia. The gap between the intellectual formation of the leadership — Pol Pot studied in Paris, Khieu Samphan wrote a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne — and the agrarian primitivism they imposed on Cambodia illustrates the danger of ideologies that can accommodate any level of violence in pursuit of historical necessity. The international response is also troubling: the United States, having contributed to the Khmer Rouge’s rise through the bombing of Cambodia and its support for Lon Nol, then supported the Khmer Rouge diplomatically after the Vietnamese invasion, because a Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government was considered geopolitically worse than the perpetrators of a genocide.. 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