MOSCOW — The government’s plan was simple enough: Rid Moscow of swastikas or any other symbol of Nazism before Victory Day, the celebration of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Germany and the most important political holiday in Russia.

But in the frenzy to comply, bookstores aiming to please the censor found an unlikely victim: “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about a Jewish family during the Holocaust. Muscovites discovered this week that the book, which bears a swastika on its cover, had been quietly stripped from the shelves of the largest bookstores across the Russian capital.

The work of the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, the novel portrays Jews as mice and Germans as cats in an anti-fascist narrative about the horrors of Nazism and the concentration camps. But with concern over the dangers of fascism in Russia on the rise, the booksellers appeared to decide it was better to be safe than sorry.

“They just got scared that someone would see the swastika on the cover,” said Varvara Gornostaeva, the chief editor of Corpus, the publishing house that released the Russian-language edition of the graphic novel more than a year ago. “But the swastika there is just a caricature. It does not fall afoul of the law banning fascist symbols.”