Tintin in The Land Of The Soviets

Tintin is sent by his Brussels newspaper to expose the true conditions of life in Bolshevik Russia, and counter the propaganda spread by Soviets and their Western fellow-travellers. Together with his faithful fox terrier Snowy, Tintin finds famine, child hunger, bureaucratic incompetence, industrial failure, bogus propaganda, state terror, gunpoint elections and massive embezzlement of the people's wealth by the government. Naturally, the Soviets aren't terribly keen for such information to leak out, and attempt to dispatch our hero at every turn - trying to bomb, shoot at, torture and freeze him in the endless snowy Steppes.

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (originally known as Les Aventures de Tintin, reporter du Petit “Vingtième”, au pays des Soviets) is the first of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé. The series features young reporter Tintin as its hero.

The story is a political satire, expressing Hergé's distrust of the Soviet Union and poking fun at its claim to have a thriving economy. According to Benoît Peeters' book (Le monde d'Hergé), the only source used by Hergé to create his story was the book entitled Moscou sans voiles (Moscow Unveiled) written by Joseph Douillet, a former Belgian consul in Soviet Russia. For such reasons, Hergé decided to withdraw the album from circulation in the 1930s. In 1973, a facsimile edition was launched, that immediately became a best-seller (100,000 copies sold in that year alone).

It is the only early Tintin adventure which Hergé did not redraw or colourise in later years, and, as a result, looks and feels very different from the other books.