Art Spiegelman has called Russian bookstores’ decision to stop selling copies of Maus – his Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust – the “harbinger of a dangerous thing”, as authorities move to remove Nazi insignia ahead of the 70th anniversary of the allied victory in the second world war.

Moscow’s major bookstores have withdrawn copies of Spiegelman’s book – which includes a Swastika on its cover – in an attempt to comply with a law banning Nazi propaganda. The 70th anniversary of Victory Day is 9 May.

“It’s a real shame because this is a book about memory,” Spiegelman told the Guardian. “We don’t want cultures to erase memory.”



Maus, which won a Pulitzer in 1992 and was published in Russian in 2013, is an anti-fascist narrative about the Holocaust told through the memories of his father, a Polish Jew who moved to the United States. The novel portrays Jews as mice and Germans as cats.

The book’s removal is apparently in response to a recent crackdown by Russian authorities on Nazi insignia. In December, Russia passed a law forbidding “Nazi propaganda”, and since then authorities have reportedly raided toy stores and antique shops believed to carry the paraphernalia.

“I don’t think Maus was the intended target for this, obviously,” Spiegelman said. “But I think [the law] had an intentional effect of squelching freedom of expression in Russia. The whole goal seems to make anybody in the expression business skittish.”

Spiegelman said it was particularly ironic that an explicitly anti-fascist book should be swept up under the law. “Stalin, after getting us into helping start world war two … was probably responsible for making the Russians liberate a lot of those camps that helped my father survive,” the author said.

“A tip of the hat for Victory Day and a middle finger for trying to squelch expression,” he said.

Next week, Russia will celebrate the 70th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in the second world war with a Victory Day parade in Moscow. The US and many European nations have declined to attend the celebration over criticism of Russia’s role in the Ukraine conflict.

Varvara Gornostayeva, the chief editor at Corpus, the book’s publisher, told AFP that major bookstore chains were taking it off their shelves and internet sites.

“There is no Nazi propaganda in it. This is a book that should be on the shelves on Victory Day,” Gornostayeva argued.

Spiegelman said that this was not the first time his book has faced censorship. When Maus was being published in German, he said his publicist had to find a way around a law that banned Swastikas on books that weren’t serious historical works. Spiegelman said he felt so strongly that the cover remain unchanged that he included this stipulation in all his publishing contracts.

In the end, Spiegelman’s publicist was able to convince the German culture ministry that the graphic novel was a serious work, and the book went on to be a success there, as well.

But Spiegelman said Russia should not to be singled out for censorship: “This is a terrible time to express oneself.”

He pointed to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine in France and the exile of whistleblower Edward Snowden as examples of how freedom of speech is under threat in the west as well.

“I think of Snowden as one of the more important freedom-of-expression issues of our time,” he said. “A righteous whistleblower is being forced into exile … in a country that is far less able to allow free expression than the one he was trying to improve.”