1. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929–1930)
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.
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets was published for the first time in Le
Petit Vingtième (the children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le
Vingtième Siècle) between 10 January 1929 and 11 May 1930, and appeared
in album form in 1930.
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.
Tintin and his dog Snowy are sent on a mission to Moscow by the
newspaper he works for. The train is blown up by an agent of the Soviet
secret police, the OGPU, and Tintin is
blamed for the "accident". He is put in jail and even taken to a torture
chamber, but wrings his way out by deceit and disguise. He then steals a
car and goes through several adventures before arriving in Moscow. He
finds that the Soviets are making people vote for their list, which is
among the present three, by pointing guns at them, and that apparently
productive factories are just hollow shells intended to fool foreign
visitors (British communists) by burning hay to produce smoke and
hitting a large sheet of corrugated iron to imitate the sound of
machinery. He also finds out the Soviets hand out bread to starving
young people only if they agree to call themselves communists,
otherwise they beat them. Tintin discovers that the Moscow region is
facing famine through lack of wheat – the bulk of the crop being
exported for propaganda purposes – so the communist leadership is
planning to pillage nearby farms. He manages to warn several kulaks of
the approaching troops, but is again captured. Escaping across the snowy
wastes, Tintin stumbles upon the secret cache of riches that Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky
have stolen from the Soviet people (including an ample supply of wheat
and also vodka and caviar). Armed with this knowledge, he turns towards
home again, via Berlin and another encounter with Soviet agents.
Returning to Brussels, he is greeted with great pomp by the rapturous public.
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