My Travels with Tintin – Russia

I only have one Tintin album in Russian, but it’s the PERFECT one – “Тинтин в стране Советов” (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets).

The Russian edition is quite frankly beautiful. Published in 2023 by Bumkniga (бумкнига), it’s more or less a standard Adventures of Tintin hardcover album (217×290 mm), in line with the rest of the Russian editions published by Melik-Pashayev (Мелик-Пашаев).

This edition might be the one with the longest lag time between visiting the country and getting my hands on an album – over 30 years! In my defense, my trip in 1994 was my first ever international excursion, so a) I hadn’t really thought up the idea to collect Tintin albums in other languages yet, and b) even if I had, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to get my hands on one. But I think it was worth the wait.

According to Wikipedia, Tintin was first published by Casterman (Кастерман) in Russian in 1993 (they must’ve known I’d be coming!). However, they only managed to print 9 albums in total:

• The Secret of the Unicorn (1993)
• Red Rackham’s Treasure (1993)
• The Seven Crystal Balls (1994)
• Prisoners of the Sun (1994)
• The Crab with the Golden Claws (1995)
• The Shooting Star (1995)
• Destination Moon (2001)
• Explorers on the Moon (2001)
• Cigars of the Pharaoh January (2004) – with MK Books (МК-Книги)

From 2013 to 2016 Maxaoh (Махаон) published the nearly complete series, missing only the outliers Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, and Tintin and Alph-Art.  And the series was republished again, in a premium format by Melik-Pashayev (Мелик-Пашаев) beginning in 2021 – skipping only Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in America and Tintin in the Picaros. The first two seem to be for relatively obvious reasons, and Picaros may or may not still be in the works. Luckily Bumkniga (бумкнига) picked up the baton and presented Tintin in the Land of the Soviets with the same dimensions as the Melik-Pashayev (Мелик-Пашаев) editions, featuring a translation that Mikhail Khachaturov prepared in 2019 for a Moulinsart digital edition.

If you’ve read my Latvian blog post, you’ll know that I had a very hard time finding Tintin in Latvian. That didn’t stop me from looking though, and during my trip to Riga in 2025, my search led me to Comics.lv. It’s a cute little store near the old town, not far from the central train station. For such a small store, it had an amazing selection of American comics and Japanese manga.. but almost all of it was translated into Russian, not Latvian. So, even though I was disappointed when the kid behind the counter told me there was no Tintin books in Latvian to be found, he did show me a selection of Franco-Belge BD that they had in Russian. And there, sitting on the shelf, just waiting for someone to plunk down 20€ was Тинтин в стране Советов. Not a bad consolation prize.

Part of me was sad, given the ongoing and historical tension, that the only Tintin book I could find in Riga was in Russian… but another, probably bigger, part of me was ecstatic to find the PERFECT language edition to add to my collection.

The kid behind the counter must’ve seen how excited I was and started asking me questions. When he found out I was from Canada, he started quizzing me on North American comics stores, with much of the same reverence in his voice and stars in his eyes that I had in the mid-1980s when discussion manga/anime shops in Japan. He even asked me if comic shops there are the same, with clerks who spend time watching goofy YouTube videos so they can argue with the customers over lovely bits of minutia. I told him he’d fit right in. 🙂

My trip to Russia:

Like Tintin, my first international adventure was in Russia.

In 1994 St. Petersburg was hosting something called the Goodwill Games. It was backed by the American Ted Turner (of CNN and generally being rich fame) and it was an answer to the boycotts of the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and designed as a way to improve US/Soviet relations during the Cold War. Even thought the Cold War was over by 1994, the third edition of the games and was held between July 23 and August 7, 1994 and I was there.

It was a big deal. Designed like an “off-cycle” Olympics, the games in St. Petersburg featured 2000 athletes, from 56 countries competing in 24 sports. And guess what, thanks to my bronze medal at the 1994 Canadian Nationals, I was one of those athletes – competing as part of the Canadian team in Taekwondo.

The Canadian national Taekwondo team consisted of 3 men and 3 women in the Heavy, Welter, and Light weight divisions (I was the Welterweight) and the 6 of us more or less WERE the Canadian contingent. As luck would have it, The 1994 Commonwealth Games were held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, between 18 and 28 August 1994 and they featured every single sport EXCEPT Taekwondo (and Short Track Speed Skating). Of course a home Commonwealth Games two weeks later meant that very few Canadian athletes were going to go to Russia, so we were pretty much it. I think there might have been a few other athletes in the athletics events… and I heard that Canada won some medals in that awesome summer sport of Short Track Speed Skating… but I personally didn’t see any other Canadians there. We mainly just hung around with the Puerto Rican boxing team. We bonded with them because they were as afraid of the Cubans as we were of the Koreans.

It was an amazing experience, beginning with my flight. I had to fly 4 hours from Edmonton to Toronto to meet up with the rest of the Ontario/Quebec based team. We then had to fly to Cincinnati because Delta Airlines was one of the Games’ sponsors. We then flew to Frankfurt, Warsaw and finally St. Petersburg – picking up other teams as we went – and arrived more hours later than I could count. Still, landing in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1994, only a few years removed from the Soviet Union blew my 22 year old mind. My main impression was that the place needed a good dusting. Almost like it was a grand old manor that had fallen into disrepair and needed a lot of sprucing up.

The games were fun, but I ended up losing my closely contested first match (2-1) to the Taekwondo athlete from… Belgium. I hope he’s a Tintin fan. 😉

But what really stuck with me was the experience outside the sport: looking out over the water and trying to spot Finland; seeing all the canals that criss cross the city; haggling with the street vendors who all seemed to be trying to sell me “Lenin’s watch” or “Stalin’s Hat” or whatever. But the two most amazing experiences had to do with language.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on my blog, I spent my school years in a French Immersion program. While that did introduce me the joys of Tintin and Asterix, it really didn’t seem to be worth very much. I had never really USED my French language abilities before. However, after spending 10 days in Russia effectively being “handled” by a nice young Russian lady who spoke English, I was feeling a bit constrained. It was made worse by the security protocols because of the Games. We weren’t allowed to just wander around on our own. I felt very cut off from the rest of the world, with only this one little access point through our guide. That is until we went to the Hermitage Museum. Amazing place, full of Tsarist treasures and art – including one of the best copies of the Mona Lisa. We also had a museum guide who was there there to tell us all about it. She was another charming young Russian lady who sadly didn’t speak English. However, as one of my teammates (Daniel) from Quebec spoke to me in French, I soon discovered, she spoke French as well. It was like a sudden jolt of pure freedom. After all that time not being able to speak to anyone outside our little bubble, we’d made contact with the outside world… and French made it happen! That was the first time I was really glad that I’d studied French and I realized that learning another language might be good for something other than just reading BD.

The other thing that happened was during the weigh-in process. As I said, I was a Welterweight. But, of course, you had to weigh in to prove you were in that class. So there I was with 7 other 20-something guys, all standing around in our underwear when the door burst open and this small, but very loud, Australian woman marches in. How embarrassing! I mean, I was practically NAKED! 🙂 Anyway, it certainly made me notice her. She was obviously a coach, and when I saw her approach one of the Korean-Russian officials (all the Taekwondo officials seemed to be hyphenated Koreans… including all our coaches) and say something in Korean… then the official said something in reply… and then she said something else… it blew. my. mind.

I hadn’t realized someone could actually LEARN to speak a language like Korean… I mean… if you weren’t born there. Looking back on it now, it was probably the easiest conversation ever, but it was a legit conversation. Ideas and information were exchanged. Communication happened. That, coupled with my later epiphany on French as a useful life hack set me on a course to start learning Korean after I returned to my university studies… but more on that in another blog post.