Posted in Le Petit Vingtième from 10 January 1929 to 8 May 1930, Tintin's first adventure, which took him to the land of the Soviets, was published a few months later in album form under the «Les Éditions du Petit Vingtième» label. 

Visit Twentieth Century, the conservative Catholic daily «ate Bolshevik at every meal».», Hergé later recalled. It was his director, Abbé Wallez, who had insisted that the cartoonist send Tintin to Soviet Russia to report on the situation. The young Georges Remi had been very shocked by the massacre of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918, and this memory still haunted him when he created Tintin and Snowy. «It struck me with horror».», he recounted on Bernard Pivot's programme Open the inverted commas, in 1973. «And I wonder if it isn't to free myself from this horror, this massacre in this cellar, [...] that I've turned my story into a farce.»

The design and script of Tintin in the land of the Soviets are admittedly very rudimentary. But the story is full of humour and includes a number of daring graphics: an entirely blackened panel that Malevich would not have disliked; the wheels of a vehicle distorted by speed, as in a Lartigue photograph; and, summed up in three striking vignettes, the rigged elections described in Moscow without sails (Joseph Douillet's book was, as we know, Hergé's only source for his founding story). And then Tintin in the land of the Soviets, is the only adventure in which the Belgian reporter can be seen writing a - very long - article, which he never sent to his newspaper!

If we look closely at the changes in the first original plate, we can see that Tintin was originally intended to travel alone, as was the case for his predecessor Totor, the little scout that Hergé had sent to the United States. The artist added in extremis a fox terrier so that Tintin had someone to talk to throughout his wanderings. As for the hero himself, he really became Tintin rather than Totor when, in the eighth panel of the story, his receding hairline was lifted during a sudden start-up.

«A fine piece of propaganda».»

The initial print run of 10,000 sold out in just under a year, and the volume was not reprinted because the plates were in poor condition. The other black-and-white adventures were adapted in colour during and just after the war, Tintin in the land of the Soviets remained a ghost album for a long time, with a mythical character: the grail of the tintinophile in a way. Occasionally, a few plates were reproduced in one or other publication, for example in the «9" section.^th art» co-authored by Pierre Vankeer and the cartoonist Morris, in an issue of the newspaper Spirou from 1964. Enough to frustrate fans!

Giving in to readers' constant complaints and to counter the emergence of pirate editions, Casterman decided to republish Tintin in the land of the Soviets, first in an anthology, Hergé Archives (1973), then in the form of a facsimile (1981). But in post-May 68 France, Hergé's work was considered reactionary by some on the left. «No colour, no humour, no care: a drawing as infantile as the ideology that serves as its pretext, a fine piece of propaganda».» This was the criticism of Soviets in the magazine Current in 1972.

In December 1998, a few days before Tintin's 70th birthday, L'Humanité hebdo rehabilitated his first adventure with a copious dossier, «Tintin a-t-il vu juste? : «Is Tintin defaming the “young Soviet Republic”? Not quite so simple. [...] All the more so as this gloomy panorama is confirmed on many points by Boris Souvarine, who is hardly suspected of conservatism.»

Tintin in the land of the Soviets was translated into Russian in 2019. But for the moment, this version only exists in digital format, published by Moulinsart.

A very rare autographed copy.