Socialism with a Petit-Bourgeois Face
Joseph Roth’s Reports from the Soviet Union
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
In the summer of 1926, author and journalist Joseph Roth set off on a five-month journey through the Soviet Union. His impressively clear and dense feature articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung stand out in several respects from the texts typical of the period that other travellers to the Soviet Union wrote: Roth sympathises with socialism, but remains sober; he casually praises and mercilessly criticises. Revolutionary excesses are less a thorn in his side than the levelling down underway in society and the mediocrity of the new Soviet bourgeoisie.
(Osteuropa 4/2012, pp. 9–20)