This collection of Roth's newspaper reports on Russia and Galicia in the mid-1920s seems to have been put together specially for this audiobook edition, but there are quite a few collections with similar contents available in book form, in English as well as German.

Before establishing himself as a novelist with Job and Radetzkymarsch, Roth was already a top-flight journalist, working for some of the biggest Berlin and Frankfurt papers. His writing here does often have a tendency towards rhetorical bombast designed to floor any hint of disagreement from the reader, but it's (mostly) used in a good cause, to expose silliness and hypocrisy and to engage our compassion for the victims of war, hunger, poverty and disease, things that were not hard to find in Russia and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Civil War.

The essays range fairly widely: the collection starts off with Roth painting comic pictures of the fashion for "Ukrainian" culture in twenties Berlin (he points out that most of the things using that label weren't Ukrainian at all) and making gentle fun of the Russian émigré community in Berlin and Paris; then we move on to essays where he combines memories of Galicia during the war with its present shattered state (he grew up in a small town in that region). The main part of the collection is an extended trip to the Soviet Union in the second half of 1926. He spends time in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev; he travels on the Volga and visits Baku. He's generally impressed by what the new revolutionary government has achieved, and he's unequivocal in his condemnation of Czarist Russia. He approves of the Soviet idea of autonomy for ethnic groups — and in particular the abolition of antisemitism — but he raises doubts about how sustainable it will all be, especially in the Caucasus where the many nations all overlap with each other and are sitting on important mineral resources. He also wonders about whether Jewish identity, defined as it is by religion, makes any sense in a secular state. At the moment (1926) the Soviet Union is an attractive place for Jews to live, but how long will that go on? He didn't exactly foresee Stalin, but he certainly put his finger on some of the weak points of the new state.

Something he singles out for particular criticism is the New Economic Policy and the aggressive class of petty-bourgeois entrepreneurs who are emerging in Russian society, undermining the attractive egalitarian ideas of the revolution and threatening to turn it into something no better than its bourgeois capitalist neighbours. Well, we all know how that panned out, both in the short term and in the long term.

On the Soviet emancipation of women he is a little less than enlightened: whilst agreeing that the way the marriage market worked for peasant women in Czarist times was unacceptable in the modern world, he is very unhappy with the unromantic, "hygienic" Soviet approach to sex and relationships. He feels that (bourgeois) women should be making themselves beautiful for his amusement, not dressing in functional clothes and working in factories. He also seems to be suspiciously well-informed about the shortage of prostitutes in Moscow...

Altogether, a very lively and entertaining snapshot of Soviet life in the interregnum between Lenin and Stalin. ( )