The Fellow-Travellers [antikvár]

introduction: The Future is There An anecdote concerning the Anglican Dean of Canterbury, the Right Reverend Hewlett Johnson, carries the force of a minor allegory. The Dean had been attending in 1950 a meeting of the World Peace Council in Rome. Delighted but a little overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of a peace-loving crowd ("an honest priest, he should be our Pope," they cried), he and his wife escaped to the Italian countryside where, finding a local bus meandering f, towards an unknowable destination, they gaily climbed aboard. Said Hewlett Johnson to the driver: "Tickets to the end of the i route, please." The impulse was entirely appropriate, for this 1 saintly-looking cleric was one of the most persévérant fellow- ' travellers of his time. But what is a fellow-traveller? A century ago Alexander Herzen ' employed the term in a political context which today must seem paradoxical. "In her future," wrote Herzen, "Russia has only one comrade, one fellow-traveller - the United States of America."' In 1918 Leon Trotsky, as Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the new bolshevik government, reverted to the same theme, though in a more guarded fashion: "America and Russia may have different aims, but if we have common stations on the same route, I can see no reason why we cannot travel together in the same car, each having the right to alight when so desired."^ But the "right to alight" was not one which in later years the Soviet regime readily accorded to its non-communist sympathizers, particularly if they were Russians. When Trotsky, in his Literature and Revolution (1923), attached the label "fellow-travellers" or paputchiki to the hesitant, doubt-ridden supporters of Marxian communism, his general spirit of tolerance was offset by a sharp note of complaint. "They do not grasp the Revolution as a whole and the communist ideal is foreign to them," explained Trotsky. "They are all more or less inclined to look hopefully at the peasant over the head of the worker. They are not the artists of the proletarian revolution, but