Tintin's Adventure with Frank Gardner

Tintin is the world's most successful comic book character.

The young Belgian reporter who travels the world

and has amazing adventures has sold over 250 million books

and been translated into 80 languages.

I'm Frank Gardner, and my day job is BBC security correspondent,

but I'm also an avid fan of Tintin.

Growing up, these stories captured my imagination,

inspired me to travel the globe, and to have adventures of my own.

And now I want to fulfil a personal ambition,

to discover Tintin's long-lost first adventure

and trace the origins of the character that inspired me.

For a children's book, Tintin's first ever adventure is a surprisingly political story

and I'll be following Tintin's route to the land of the Soviets,

from Brussels...

..to Berlin...

and on to Moscow to find out what really shaped my childhood hero

on my very own Tintin adventure.

I can't claim to have read all the Tintin books,

but the ones that I did read when I was growing up

were a real inspiration to me,

because here was Tintin, this young, go-getting investigative journalist, this reporter,

who seemed to be getting himself into dodgy places,

but always travelling, always on the move, always in the middle of some adventure.

That sense of movement, of high-speed excitement,

is a signature characteristic of every Tintin adventure,

and I notice it can be traced right back to the black and white images

that sped off the pages of the very first story.

Herge loved to make his cartoons feel real

by including things people would recognise.

One of Tintin's first high-speed chases

is in the most exciting vehicle of the late twenties, the Amilcar.

I've tracked down the model for the car Tintin uses,

and, 80 years on, it's lost none of its appeal.

It's owned today by Terry McGrath.

Ah, there it is! What a beauty.

-Look at this.

-Amilcar CGSS model.

-And this is exactly the model that Tintin was in?

-It seems so from the drawings, yes.

-Oh, this is brilliant.

-Made in Paris.

Wow. Well, I remember in the Tintin when he goes to Russia,

and he buys one of these in Berlin, actually,

he gets it as a reward, and the salesman says to him,

this thing will do 150k tops. No problem at all on the flat, so about 90mph.

About 90mph this will do, yes.

-So, he was quite accurate then?

-Yes.

-Wow. Well, I can't wait to... Can I get in and...

-Indeed.

I'm not going to try and drive it, you're going to do the driving.

I'm being cheeky, can I wear the goggles?

-Vintage goggles, they are.

-Oh, yes!

-Is that OK?

-Yes, great.

I'm ready for my close-up.

ENGINE STARTS

Three, two, one, go!

Right from the outset, Herge was filling his stories

with the most thrilling, glamorous machines of his day.

This car is 83 years old?

Indeed it is, yes, and still races.

Great stuff.

Do you know, I've got to say, for me, this is just the essence

of the whole Tintin adventure thing, you know?

In my mind, we're racing across Eastern Europe

and who knows what mischief and mistakes he's going to make

and what mess he's going to get himself into.

But right now, he's got the wind in his hair

and he's burning across Europe in this,

and that, to me, is the whole essence of the Tintin adventure.

Wow! It really goes, doesn't it?

The first Tintin adventure, The Land Of The Soviets,

is filled with what would become Tintin trademarks,

like high-speed chases and irrepressible villains,

but it's clearly a work in progress.

In the first pages,

our hero looks very different to the character we know today.

He's simplistic and almost unrecognisable.

But none of that mattered to Tintin's first audience.

Originally published in weekly instalments

in the Belgium newspaper Le Petit Vingtieme,

the comic strip was a huge success from the outset.

I want to find out why these unassuming sketches

were such an instant hit.

Michael Farr was a friend of Herge's.

He's a writer and a leading Tintin expert.

He was the pioneer.

It was Herge who was developing in Europe the idea of the strip cartoon

and what we now know as the bande dessinee,

the strip cartoon, stems from his developments.

What is the legacy of that book?

What has it given us, apart from the fact that it spawned

all the future Tintin books that followed?

I think it's a pioneering work of art and literature, believe it or not.

I mean, he's known as an artist, but, goodness, what a storyteller.

It's the work of a debutant, but one with tremendous talent.

It is a seminal work in the history of the strip cartoon in Europe.

If you go to any convention now of strip cartoonists,

Herge is a god to them, and this is a very important work

because it's the beginnings of what, to them, is a very great artist's oeuvre.

Although his stories really captured my early imagination,

this first book is the one I didn't know at all when I was growing up,

and for a very good reason.

Shortly after its first publication,

it vanished completely for over 40 years.

Its author, the perfectionist Herge, was unhappy with the book.

He felt it was rushed and poorly thought through.

And yet this is the book that gave rise

to a multi-million pound comic strip empire,

and far from being a book to hide away,

I think this could be the most important Tintin book of all.

To really understand what the book tells us about the origins of this cartoon hero

I need to get to Brussels - the starting point for every Tintin adventure.

Since I was injured on assignment in 2004,

travelling the world is not as easy as it was,

but there is always a way.

I'm going to be using this thing called a hand bike,

which basically converts my wheelchair into a trike.

And this is going to allow me hopefully

to skate across all these cobbles

in places like Brussels and Moscow.

One to Brussels, please.

Following in the footsteps of Tintin.

On this journey, this book will be my guide.

In the story, Tintin is a young Belgian reporter

and he's sent by his editor to Russia

to find out what life is like under the new Bolshevik regime there in the 1920s.

So he travels overland to Moscow via Brussels and Berlin,

and almost from the outset, he's trailed by the Russian secret police.

Ultimately, Tintin and his dog Snowy are successful

in uncovering the supposed secrets of the Bolsheviks

and how they're stealing the food of the Soviet people,

rigging elections and murdering opponents.

So this is the story that introduced the world to one of the most famous double acts in literature -

Tintin and his faithful dog, Snowy.

And while Tintin is this rather serious-minded action hero,

Snowy is quick-witted, he's mischievous,

he drinks champagne, he puffs away on cigars.

And over the next 50 years and 24 volumes, the two become inseparable.

This is Brussels - the very home of Tintin and Herge

and it doesn't take long to find Belgium's most famous son.

This is a panel here from the third story, Tintin In America.

And although the actual book was later published in colour,

this is how the original drawing looked.

You can't help noticing the incredible sense of speed,

and movement and drama

that's generated by just these simple lines,

drawn by a young artist 80 years ago.

Brussels is a natural jumping-off point

for journeys anywhere in Europe, Russia and beyond.

This square in Brussels has got a bit of significance for me

because, of course, this is the home of Tintin,

but it's also where I set off in my late teens and early 20s.

On all my European trips, I'd set out from here.

We hitchhiked, myself and a mate, to Zagreb in Croatia

and got from here down to Istanbul,

so it always feels like the beginning of a journey in Brussels.

Quite an exciting place for me.

The first stop for me on my journey has got to be the Herge Museum -

a £13 million tribute to Belgium's most famous comic book hero.

It's the place where much of the original artwork is held.

I've come to meet Yves Fevrier,

the multimedia director of the Herge Museum.

I realise that for Tintin fans this is pretty much hallowed ground -

the Herge Museum outside Brussels.

I've come here to see one of the original manuscripts

and I think there's chance that you're going to let me see it, is that right?

Yes, you are quite lucky

because there are not many people who will be really like you,

more or less touching a few originals, you know.

This original page from Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets

is so valuable,

it has to be brought out of a bank vault.

Wow.

This is drawn by hand, by Herge, in 1929?

Yes, it's really like a Mona Lisa here in the museum

because it's really a very symbolic page also.

This manuscript must be pretty valuable. What are we talking?

One painting in colour, the cover of Tintin In America

reached, if I remember correctly,

the price of 300,000 euros, something like that, if I remember correctly.

So it's a big value.

So if I ran away with this now, on my bike...

-You are a rich man.

-I'd be a rich man.

And you will be chased by the police, you know!

Just like in Tintin, yeah!

George Remi was just 21

when he created Tintin under the pen name, Herge.

I think it amazing that Herge was entirely self taught as an artist.

What's even more remarkable is that the inventor of the globe-trotting Tintin

had only ever left Belgium on brief camping trips with the Boy Scouts.

Though Herge's adventures are set in the most exotic locations,

I can now see that Tintin is inextricably Belgian.

The first book reveals that he was clearly a product of Belgium in the 1920s.

The Russian Revolution had taken place

12 years before the first page of Tintin came into being.

Belgium lived in the shadow of the new and vast Soviet empire.

Stories abounded of Soviet oppression

and fear of communism was endemic.

Tintin was actually commissioned by Herge's boss, Abbe Norbert Wallez.

Wallez was not only a newspaper editor -

he was also a Catholic priest and a fascist,

having a signed portrait of Mussolini on his office wall.

Wallez set Herge a brief to create a cartoon character

to expose Russia as the evil empire to the children of Belgium.

To help him with his research,

he gave Herge a piece of anti-Bolshevik propaganda.

This was a key influence -

the book called Moscou Sans Voiles, Moscow Unveiled,

by a former Belgian console

who lived in the USSR called Joseph Douillet.

And this guy was passionately anti-communist,

passionately anti-Russian -

he loathed everything from caviar to commissars.

And he goes to a rigged village election

in which he describes verbatim how the villagers are being presented

with three lists of candidates and one of them is communist

and everybody who opposes that raise your hands,

and according to him, they had revolvers pointed at them.

Well, that is exactly the scene that we see here in Herge's book,

Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets - even the words match,

"trois listes sont en presence - l'une est celle du parti communiste".

"Three lists are in front of you - one is that of the communist party."

And that's exactly what we see here.

When it came to images, Herge was no less fastidious

in his approach to detail.

In later works, we know that he based his drawings closely

on photographs of real locations.

But as Herge never actually visited Russia

and precious few photographs existed,

it's always been assumed that the first book

was entirely drawn from his imagination, until recently.

The French photojournalist Robert Sexe was amongst the first

to bring Russia to the West, with a series of reports

and photographs documenting the real Russia.

Sexe travelled the length of Russia on his motorbike

and his pictures caused a sensation.

I've come to meet Belgian writer Jean-Paul Schulz,

who's been researching the links between Sexe and Herge.

Tintin's first adventure appeared in 1929 - just four years after

Robert Sexe's own well-publicised motorbike journey across Russia.

In the '20s, Belgian papers were widely reporting

Sexe's journeys around the world.

After Russia, he travelled to the Congo and America.

And I can't help noticing that those are the precise locations

Herge chooses for the first three Tintin books.

There are many theories about who Herge based Tintin on,

but clearly there is a case at least that it was Robert Sexe.

Herge's work is almost everywhere in Brussels,

images now famous the world over.

To have one character that resonated was one thing,

but to build a whole cast was something else again.

Beyond Tintin and Snowy,

Herge produced a world of colourful characters.

Most memorably Professor Calculus, the eccentric professor,

the Thompson Twins, Herge's hapless detectives,

and of course Captain Haddock,

the sea captain famous for his never-ending string of expletives.

But it wasn't until the 1950s that Herge's creations

started to find an audience beyond Belgium.

Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and a colleague, Michael Turner,

believed that British children would love the books too.

In the 1950s, they persuaded a publishing company to take a chance on Tintin.

The publisher's only condition - that Leslie and Michael

translated the books without pay and in their own time.

They spent four hours on each page, making sure the meaning

and the humour worked.

Before setting out on my travels, I managed to catch up with Leslie,

where she now lives in Buckinghamshire.

Leslie, it's fantastic to meet you

because you are the person behind all the English translations

of all the Tintins, you and Michael, the other half of your team.

There's an inscription here from Herge himself dated 1977, saying,

"To Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, who did so much for my little son."

Which is fantastic - and presumably he drew this himself?

He was a very sensitive character

and had a lovely sense of humour,

which Michael Turner and I sort of...were on the same level.

You've very diligently kept notes here

which you've kindly shared with us

and it must have been extraordinarily difficult

to translate some of the jargon in this...

I mean, Captain Haddock

with his "billions of blue blistering barnacles" - was that your expression?

Yes!

But we had to start the Captain with a fresh vocabulary,

it wasn't going to work, you couldn't translate it as such.

And we had a free hand - Herge agreed as to what we were going to do,

because some of the jokes that were funny in French

wouldn't mean anything in English.

Just looking here, Leslie, at the second page of phrases

that you've translated from the French,

but with your own made-up translation, I suppose.

They're fantastic, these are virtually all attributable to Captain Haddock,

squawking popinjay, fancy-dress freebooter,

black beetles, pyrographs,

gogglers, ignoramus, goosecap, pickled herring, sycophant,

thug, dizzards, road-hog, steam-roller,

wretch and boasting nitwit.

Are these all your creations, these phrases, you and Michael?

Well, they were Michael and me.

The thing was, that the Captain was very colourful

and he needed to be extremely colourful in the English edition,

so we made him so.

Meanwhile, back in Brussels, I'm concentrating

on Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets.

This pretty ugly building behind me here

is the modern version of Brussels' Gare Du Nord railway station,

the station from which Tintin set off on his great journey

in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets.

'Tintin leaps in and out of cars, trains and planes without a second's thought.

'So I must admit, I sometimes envy him.'

This is a slightly more complicated journey than Tintin would have had to take.

Because I'm in a wheelchair, I've got to be escorted

by the station officials simply to get underground

to get onto the train to leave Brussels.

I can't help thinking that it's ironic I'm in Brussels,

the home of European Legislation

and yet there isn't

proper wheelchair access to the station platforms.

It stinks of pee down here.

This is a lift-cum-toilet, isn't it?

'Finally, I emerge from the catacombs 'and make it onto the platform.'

I should just say that all of this is so I can get onto this train in a wheelchair,

It's a double-decker train -

I've never been on a double-decker train - this is very exciting.

So I'm now setting off from Brussels in the train, exactly the way

that Tintin would have done back in 1929,

when this was the very first frame,

the very opening of his very first Tintin book from this station.

TRAIN WHISTLE TOOTS

No sooner has Tintin settled into his rail journey to Berlin,

than an unkempt Bolshevik baddie tries to blow him to pieces.

I'm hoping that I'll have an easier time with the man

-I've

-arranged to meet - collector and Tintin enthusiast Simon Doyle.

Ah, Simon you made it, great.

-Good morning, Frank.

-Good morning, have a seat.

-Thank you very much.

I suppose given that we're on a train in Belgium,

it's only fair to ask

why do you think we see so many trains in this book?

I mean, it's really a part of Herge's outlook, isn't it?

I think the mistake that we make now is to regard these as period pieces.

You've got to remember at the time,

that this was very up-to-the-minute gadgetry,

it was the James Bond approach.

Any chance to put technology in, Herge includes -

so you've got fast cars, motorboats,

planes - anything that can be made to look fast and modern is there.

So I'm sure that children seeing this every Thursday in the newspaper

were very, very impressed at how modern, how adventurous Tintin was.

I mean looking at this, the end of the first double page here -

somebody has blown Tintin up in his railway carriage

and he's left with a sort of shattered remnants and yet

he seems to be completely unharmed - his clothes are a bit tattered.

Did the readership not mind that these were totally unrealistic scenarios?

Oh no, I think it was probably of the time,

the serial in silent cinema, for example,

was famous for having the impossible cliffhanging ending one week

which then went onto the next week

and through some remarkable reverse, some other incidents had happened.

So in this case, Tintin is blown to pieces

at the end of the first week - we have little bits of Tintin flying round about,

but luckily, when you get to week two,

the readership will have seen that his sleeve has been blown off

and he seems to have survived the complete destruction of the train

and the loss of every single other passenger that is on board.

Yes, as the policeman says - "Where are your fellow passengers, "what have you done with them?

"Where is the rest of the railway carriage?

"Where are the seats? Why did the alarms go off?

"No lies, off to the police station."

He's been fitted up for this one, hasn't he?

He certainly has. It's quite remarkable,

but I think part of the fun of it for the reader

will have been exactly that - how IS he going to get out of it?

And just like In The Land Of The Soviets,

my journey continues to Berlin.

I need to get there to pay homage to a scene

that literally shapes our hero.

Herge has Tintin stop in Berlin, not just because it's on his route

but because it's the capital city of the Roaring '20s.

It's fast and fun and is the location of choice for anyone

wanting to add a touch of a glamour to a story.

This is where Herge plunged his character

into an action scene that would change the way he looked forever.

Tintin is endlessly pursued by people out to get him.

It culminates in a daring escape in a Mercedes car,

the "it" car of the day.

I wanted to track down the exact model that Herge used in his chase scene,

and I may have found the only man in Europe who has one in his extraordinary collection -

Mercedes enthusiast Herr Jorg Netzer.

Oh, my God.

This is incredible,

this is an almost unique collection of original Mercedes Benz,

mostly as you can see from the 1920s and '30s,

but they've even got some...

This one is an original Benz from 1897, amazing.

This is like a treasure trove of antique car gems.

'But what I'm really hoping to find is the car that Tintin used

'for his fast chase through Berlin.'

Wow. This is the one, according to Herr Netzer, the chief mechanic here.

This is pretty much the exact car that Tintin stole

from the Berlin police in 1929 and roared off towards Moscow in.

And it's a 1928 Mercedes Benz, K Class Open Tourer.

And as you can see, it's a beautiful piece of work

and I'm hoping that I can persuade him

to let us take it out on the streets of Berlin.

There is a curious reason why this Mercedes was so hard to track down.

It was literally a victim of its own success.

Being the fastest, smartest car around at the time,

it got adopted by the Nazis. As a result, after the war,

that association meant that most were destroyed.

Afternoon!

But it was here in the front seat of his Mercedes Benz

that Herge's prototype Tintin started to look like the character we know today.

What I'm actually doing now, is... re-enacting a pretty seminal moment

in the whole Tintin story, because this is how Tintin got his quiff.

In the first eight pages of the story,

Tintin has smooth combed hair.

But when he jumps from a tree

into this Mercedes Benz and races away,

the wind causes this famous transformation

which never leaves him.

Hence this trademark quiff that Tintin had,

which I'm going to try very hard not to cultivate.

There is one more place in Berlin that features in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets

and I'm hoping that Herr Netzer will get me in there.

Hanger two it says, that way, let's try this.

We're now at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport,

which is obviously steeped in history,

it's where the Zeppelins took off from,

it's where parades used to be held under the Kaiser

and for Tintin, this is where the Berlin police took off from

to pursue him as he escaped towards Russia in a stolen car like this.

Tintin and Snowy come under an aerial bombardment

by the German police.

And I'm hoping to get onto the now-abandoned airfield

that launched that attack.

That's where we need to be.

SPEAKS GERMAN

We're just trying to negotiate access to get onto the runway.

-No chance.

-No chance?

-No chance.

-What, it's terribly secret, because there's nothing there?

-Yes.

We have to fill up a form and we have no form and...

-He can't give us a form?

-No.

I thought that sort of bureaucracy kind of went out with the end of East Germany?

Yes, that's really Germany!

Well, I was thinking of EAST Germany actually, but OK, all right.

What does he think we might do on a runway

where there are no planes taking off?

We're flying off with the car.

Oh, that we might fly with the car, yeah - there is a big risk of that,

you're right, actually. Sort of Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang!

-Yeah, I know - it flies, it flies. It WILL take off.

-Stop the films.

It's a shame we didn't get to see the runway,

but like all the best Tintin stories, I never really expected everything to go to plan.

Tintin makes his way from Berlin to Russia

by crashing his car into a train.

But...the BBC health and safety policy wouldn't really allow me

to do that, so I've opted to go by air instead.

I last visited Moscow 24 years ago and I can't wait to get back.

I want to get to the places the book features

and explore the real-life inspirations behind Tintin's adventures in Soviet Russia.

I'm chuffed to be back in Russia.

80 years after Tintin's first outing, it still feels like an adventure.

Today of course, most of it looks nothing like the grim Soviet capital

I visited in winter and this affluent modern city

is completely different to the one encountered by Tintin in the 1920s.

He found a population in despair queuing up for bread.

It's at this point in the book that the story becomes overtly political.

Tales of Russian food shortages in the 1920s were eagerly reported

in the Belgian press, quick to point to the failings

of a revolutionary system so feared by its readership.

Uniquely, Herge brought these dark stories to young people

through a cartoon strip, only softening stories of starving children

by having Snowy come to the rescue.

Well, seeing the Kremlin walls here for the first time in 24 years

reminds me of one of those things that you do when you're young and dumb.

Cos when I came here in the winter of 1987,

it was an incredibly harsh winter and together with a couple of mates

we ran around this, the whole walls of the Kremlin just in T-shirts,

in about minus 28 and the Kremlin guards looked at us

and they just thought we were mad, it was... Yeah - we were pretty mad.

Oh wow! Do you know, I never thought I'd be wheeling across the cobbles

of Red Square in the heart of Moscow in a wheelchair with an adapted hand bike,

but this is very much in the spirit of Tintin

because he was always improvising and looking for new ways to get to places.

He used a trolley across a railway line,

he carved a wooden propeller for a plane,

so I feel that this hand bike attachment I've got here in Moscow's Red Square

is very much in the spirit of Tintin.

Herge was fascinated by innovation - he loved things that were new

or newsworthy - he often referenced them in his weekly strip cartoons.

One of the most unusual appears in Land Of The Soviets.

It's an artistic reference to a Russian picture that was creating a stir at the time.

This is Moscow's Museum of Modern Art, the Tretyakov State Gallery.

Well, in front of me here is something that was absolutely groundbreaking in Russian art.

This is Malevich's Black Square.

Hardly the most original title,

but it was completely revolutionary for its time.

He painted this in 1915.

And amazingly, the young Herge, when he was starting out

on his Tintin series, he actually used this as a device.

He's being pursued, they're firing after him, he goes into a room,

kills the lights, they're shouting kill him and the last square

is completely black, just like Malevich's Black Square.

This is Herge the young artist, combining a cliffhanger ending

with a reference to the very latest from the artistic avant-garde movement.

This is just one of the artistic influences that Herge used

from around the world,

and you can imagine

the suspense that he would have left his readers in.

They would have got to the end of that week's issue

in the magazine and it's just a black square -

they don't know if Tintin is alive or dead.

Well, of course he survives, even more intent than ever

on uncovering the lies of the Bolshevik regime.

Land Of The Soviets was published 12 years after the October Revolution.

Lenin was dead and Joseph Stalin was beginning to exert his rule over the country with an iron fist.

Socialists from around the world travelled to Russia to see

for themselves the first revolution in which the state took control

of everything from agriculture to industry to the provision of power.

Now, ever since I first saw the book, I've been fascinated

by one sequence in particular.

It's where Herge tells the story of a visit made by English trade unionists to Russian industry.

Herge depicts the visitors being supposedly duped

into believing their host's propaganda.

Well, this is the power station that provides the heating for Central Moscow.

And it's one that was visited by a British trade union delegation

in the 1920s, exactly as depicted in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets

and there's Lenin with a typical slogan from the time,

saying, "we will arrive at the victory of communist labour".

Trade union leaders were understandably eager to take tours

of factories and power stations to see what a collective labour movement could achieve.

But Herge makes sure that Tintin investigates further.

Tintin is not taken in by what Herge sees as the charade

of Bolshevik industry.

Hello, Irina, it's Frank from the BBC.

-Yes, Frank.

-Hi, can you open the door, please?

I met up with Irina Karazuba,

who's an expert on this period of Russian history.

So...there's this scene here, Irina,

where to me looking at this,

this depiction of this British delegation of trade unionists

with pipes and flat caps,

and it looks completely absurd,

they look like a character out of Jeeves and Wooster or something,

I mean - it looks a bit fantastical.

You know, there were really very close contacts

between the British leaders of trade union movement

and leaders of the Labourist Party.

A couple of times during the mid-'20s, delegations of British trade union leaders came here

and they took part in Soviet trade union congresses

and then published certain documents

and they created a special committee for Anglo/Russian unity.

The aim of the Soviet side is quite obvious -

they were trying to penetrate in the world trade movement and then

to use it as a force for making the world proletariat revolution.

The aim of those gentlemen... in my opinion,

they saw in the Soviet Union what they wanted to see, you know?

They were dreaming of a country where social justice will take its place,

where the ordinary people will flourish and so on and so forth.

And to some extent they see what was specially prepared for them.

The details of Tintin adventures in Russia are quite fantastic,

yes, but the spirit of the country

of very ruthlessly oppressing its own citizens -

who cannot even be called citizens,

who are more like slaves - the spirit is true.

Tintin's opposition to the Bolsheviks

makes him public enemy number one

and he quickly finds himself in jail -

a fate shared by many who denounced the Soviet state.

Herge was drawing on reports appearing in the Belgian press that

under Stalin's rule, many dissidents were killed or simply disappeared.

Something that the Soviet Union was keen to cover up at the time.

I think Herge and his editor

would definitely have approved of this sign

because it refers to 1920s Russia as the "years of terror" in which

it says over 40,000 people were shot on groundless political charges.

Well, it's exactly that kind of brutality that Herge

was describing in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets.

In the 1920s, kulaks - middle class country farmers -

were described by Lenin

as bloodsuckers, vampires and plunderers of the people.

Stories abounded that these independent farmers

had their grain and property robbed by a state

at odds with land ownership and personal wealth.

Herge has Tintin investigate.

I'm travelling out to the countryside now,

to meet a third-generation kulak

to ask what HE made of the way the story was portrayed in Herge's cartoon strip.

OK, well I've been told that this is the station

to get to this little village of Dmitrov out in the country,

so I have no idea how I'm going to get on the train

with this contraption, but let's give it a try.

Right, well I've found out which platform it is...

I've got to say I'm really impressed with Russian railways.

It's been so much easier to get me

and my wheelchair and the bike on board this train than it was in Brussels,

far easier than in Britain,

so I hope you're taking note here, Southwest Trains and Virgin and all the rest of you.

I've always loved long train journeys,

especially ones that cross national boundaries.

One of the best ones I took was from Egypt down to Khartoum in Sudan,

and that was entirely on the roof of the train for 36 hours.

Another one was just sitting on a rucksack with a girl, who is now my wife,

going round Sri Lanka in an open doorway going slowly past villages.

So heading out here to a Russian village,

it's great, because I know that in theory,

I could go all the way to Siberia and the Pacific coast if I wanted.

It was the Soviet Union's rural communities that suffered

most heavily under Stalin's management of agriculture.

"Comrades, we are short of wheat!

"The little we have is needed for our foreign propaganda.

"The only solution is to organise an expedition against the kulaks

"and force them at gunpoint to give up their corn."

I've come to the village of Dmitrov to meet Vladimir Evseev.

He's a modern-day Kulak, who owns

20 hectares of land on which he's growing potatoes,

carrots and other vegetables,

but I seem to have arrived in the middle of an argument.

Well, just like Tintin,

as a reporter, I'm keen to find out what's going on.

Hello.

You had a bit of trouble there, what was all that about?

Well, in Soviet time I didn't even know what the bribe means.

Now I know it perfectly, how much and where to give some money.

Vladimir tells me he's been asked to pay bribes to the police

to allow him to sell his vegetables from his own field

by the side of the road, but he's refusing to do so.

Have you ever had to pay a bribe before?

Of course! Every Russian pays bribes. To the road police,

to the administration, to the...

Every Russian, if anyone says he's not paying anything,

it means he lives in a house for crazy people.

Vladimir's family have worked the land here for almost a century.

His grandparents were amongst those who were robbed

and displaced by the state in the 1920s.

Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets has never been published in Russia,

but I'm interested to find out what Vladimir thinks of Herge's portrayal

of this period of Soviet history.

Now, in Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets,

the Belgian author Herge depicts the kulaks as being innocent good guys

and the Bolsheviks as taking... stealing their grain.

Is that accurate?

Yeah, yeah - quite exact.

There was a programme to destroy all these strong guys -

it was a state programme.

So it was a political programme?

-Yes, that was.

-Not just economic?

Yeah, that was a policy.

Tintin helps the Kulaks hide their grain from the Bolsheviks,

but in reality, there was very little the Kulaks could do to defend themselves.

Vladimir's own grandfather protested and like many other kulaks,

was sent to the now infamous Gulag labour camps.

Though his family survived, countless others were killed.

The food they once grew was siphoned off to large cities, or used for export.

Thousands of people in rural areas starved to death.

There was a time when whole regions were dying from hunger.

We can probably see it maybe somewhere in Africa nowadays,

where the people are starving and die from hunger or from thirst, right?

But at that time it was real, as real as we sit here and discuss it.

Do you feel that this is a broadly-accurate description

of the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia in the 1920s?

Is there anything that is inaccurate in it?

This is the evidence of one man, right,

so it can't be accurate in all... You know, in all little things.

But the majority of it, I think, is true.

Many political prisoners from the labour camp that once stood

at Dmitrov were forced to dig this canal.

It's 80 miles long and connects Moscow to the sea

and the world beyond.

Well, Tintin of course had one of his escapades on a speedboat -

perhaps a little different from this.

He was being pursued

by the Bolshevik police. It had a machine gun on the back.

Well, we have neither,

though we are on a typical example of new money here in Russia.

There is so much money going around in Moscow and an example of it

is our man here, Deema - this is his boat, he's the skipper as well.

Let's see how fast this can go - Deema...?

This canal was part of Stalin's plan to strengthen and expand the Workers' Republic.

Ironically, in post-Soviet Russia today, it's become a playground

for the rich and it's still the fastest route back to the city.

Though Moscow is almost unrecognisable from Tintin's time,

remnants of the Soviet era are still to be found.

This is Lubyanka Square

and this big yellow building up here is the old KGB building,

now the headquarters of Russian Intelligence, and it's also

what used to be the base for the OGPU - the predecessors of the KGB,

whose agents Tintin keeps encountering trying to do dark and evil deeds.

At every turn, the OGPU tried to silence Tintin and stop him

revealing the truth about Bolshevik Russia.

Being here, I can't help wondering how Tintin might have coped in a modern-day Russia

and I know a man who should have a pretty good idea.

Daniel Sandford is a BBC Moscow correspondent,

a modern-day foreign reporter.

Hello, Frank. Welcome to Russia.

-I've caught you working.

-I do, occasionally.

I think what I'm curious to know from you is,

what's it like being a foreign correspondent in Russia now?

Although Russia has changed, it hasn't changed very much -

so it's a difficult place to do business,

it's even a difficult place to get into as a journalist still.

In a way, although the Cold War has been over for...

theoretically for 20 years, it does feel as if some of the kind of 007 traits,

some of even the things going back as far as Tintin

of people snooping and spying on foreigners, it still happens.

The FSB has got over 200,000 officers,

it is an enormous organisation,

it's expanded vastly in the last ten years.

We have to assume that occasionally people are watching us,

listening to our phone conversations,

searching our flats without our knowledge, or perhaps deliberately

searching our flats and cars so we know they've been searched.

So when you go out on a story, are you being tailed,

are you being watched?

I think that would be unlikely.

One of the things of course is that you don't know,

but there are examples of journalists who the security services

have made them very aware that they're being watched.

It hasn't happened for a long time to a foreign correspondent,

but, you know, journalists also do get very badly beaten and killed.

It's never quite clear to what extent the state is responsible for that

or whether it's kind of organised crime,

people involved in terrorism and other kind of power groups.

Herge - always a fan of weaving reality into his stories -

now has his masterstroke - he draws on a breaking story

and includes it in his weekly serialisation.

In January 1930, just one month before Tintin's capture was published,

General Koutiepoff -

a Russia exile - had been abducted in Paris

by the Russian Secret Service - this really did happen.

They believed he was behind a plot to overthrow the Bolshevik regime.

The story was big news in the European press

and Herge applied some of the details to his Tintin adventure.

But he also produces this fake letter which gets printed

in his newspaper, Le Petit Vingtieme, as an April Fools joke,

and it supposedly comes from the Russian Secret Police -

and it reads in French,

"Take care - the eye of Red Moscow is watching you.

"Don't forget the fate reserved for General Koutiepoff.

"So make a choice - the end of this campaign by Tintin or death."

Signed...

the President of the GPU, the OGPU, the Russian Secret Police.

But unlike the unfortunate General Koutiepoff,

who died during his abduction, Tintin escapes.

He gets his kidnapper arrested and receives a reward

for supposedly saving Europe from Bolshevik oppression.

In later life, Herge reflected on Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets.

He said it remained the only Tintin book not to be revised

and put into colour because it was flawed,

suffering from an over-dependence on one-sided news reports

and a deeply anti-Bolshevik view of Soviet Russia.

Herge's next book certainly had its flaws,

leading to accusations of racism.

But he vowed from then on to thoroughly research the countries he sends Tintin off to,

properly mapping out his adventures in advance,

rather than just writing each episode hurriedly on the day of publication.

Well, it's the end of the Land Of The Soviets and of course

it's been a bit of an adventure for me too, although I don't think

I was actually pursued by Russian secret agents like Tintin was.

The thing is that back in the 1920s and '30s, very few journalists

were going to Russia to report on the atrocities taking place

under the Bolshevik regime there.

And yet here you've got this fictional journalist, Tintin,

essentially telling a story for children.

I find that extraordinary, because I can't think of many examples

of children's literature that tackle such adult themes.

Throughout the adventure, Tintin, like his creator,

is finding his feet.

By the time we reach the final frame, both are ready

for a stream of adventures that would fill the next half century.

As Tintin and Snowy make their way home, Snowy remarks,

"Goodbye, danger - our daredevil days are over. Thank goodness!"

But of course THIS was just the beginning.

TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

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