Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is sent with his dog Snowy on an assignment to the Soviet Union, departing from Brussels. En route to Moscow, an agent of the OGPU - the Soviet secret police - sabotages the train and declares the reporter to be a "dirty little bourgeois". The Berlin Police blame Tintin for the bombing but he escapes to the border of the Soviet Union. Following closely, the OGPU agent finds Tintin and brings him before the local Commissar's office, instructing the Commissar to make the reporter "disappear ... accidentally". Escaping again, Tintin finds "how the Soviets fool the poor idiots who still
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets high prices". To stem this illegal trade, Hergé agreed to a 1973 republication as part of the collection, where it appeared in a collected volume alongside "Tintin in the Congo" and "Tintin in America". With unofficial copies continuing to be sold, Casterman produced a facsimile edition of the original in 1981. Over the next decade, it was translated into nine languages, with an English-language edition translated by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner published by Sundancer in 1989. This edition was republished in 1999 for the 70th anniversary of "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets". Sociologist John Theobald noted that