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 (character) and has prompted a few to devote their careers to his study. General Charles de Gaulle "considered Tintin his only international rival". Hergé biographer Pierre Assouline noted that "Tintin had a prehistory", being influenced by a variety of sources that Hergé had encountered throughout his life. Hergé noted that during his early schooling in the midst of World War I, when German armies occupied Belgium, he had drawn pictures in the margins of his school workbooks of an unnamed young man battling (a slang term for the Germans). He later commented that these drawings depicted a brave and adventurous character