The prescient politics of Tintin: The character was in effect Hergé’s alter ego, reflecting his intense interest in news and contemporary affairs (Michael Farr, January 9, 2025, The Spectator)
Already in that first Soviet adventure, we have the Bolsheviks seizing the grain of the peasant farmers for their own stockpiles, leading to famine and starvation. Hergé had read up on the Soviet grain procurement crisis of the previous year (1928) and in his narrative anticipates the alienation of grain and property from the kulaks, the land-owning peasantry, that came in 1930-31 after the book’s publication. The Great Famine of 1932-33 that killed millions of Ukrainians and others followed as a consequence of Stalin’s policies, exposed by Tintin and condemned by Hergé.
Politics was never far from Hergé’s agenda. National Guardsmen drive Native Americans off the reservation at bayonet point after oil has been struck on their land in Tintin in America (1932). But the next deep political involvement came with The Blue Lotus in 1934. Here, against the trend of western sentiment, Hergé sided with the Chinese against Japanese agitation and aggression in Manchuria. He depicts the staged Mukden incident when in September 1931 Japanese saboteurs blew up the South Manchuria Railway tracks. […]
Politics was also at the core of King Ottokar’s Scepter (1938) inspired by Nazi Germany’s Anschluss, or absorption of neighboring Austria, in March of that year and anticipating its takeover of the Sudetenland and the threat posed to some of the vulnerable kingdoms of central Europe. Tintin thwarts the plot hatched by the unsubtly named fascist Müsstler — an amalgamation of Mussolini and Hitler — allowing the king to retain his throne and his kingdom, the fictional Balkan nation of Syldavia, to remain intact.