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) been written by any Belgian in my situation. They are not very intelligent, I know, and do me no honour: they are 'Belgian' books." Peeters deemed the early Tintin to be "a Sartre-esque character", an "existentialist before the term had been coined", having "no surname, no family, hardly anything of a face, and the mere semblance of a career." Ultimately, he deemed him nothing but a "narrative vehicle" for the story, being an otherwise incoherent character. The image of Tintin—a round-faced young man running with a white fox terrier by his side—is easily one of the most recognisable visual icons