We can date it almost down to the hour: by sometime just before Victory Day (May 9), 2015, comics in Russia started to matter. Leading up to what Russians call the maiskie kanikuly (May holidays), when Moscow celebrates the Soviet Union's World War II victory over the Germans with period street decorations (banners, posters, slogans), Red Square military parades, and fireworks--that is, a time of peak patriotism-- Maus disappeared from bookstore shelves. It's true that Art Spiegelman's seminal 1991 comics memoir about his father's experiences during the Holocaust, released in Russian translation in 2013 by the prestige publisher Corpus Press, had been selling handsomely. But that's not why copies started going missing all at once, in late April. Press reports noted that one suddenly could not find Maus at branches of two major Moscow bookstores, Dom Knigi (House of the Book) and Moskva. You couldn't find the book on the latter store's website either. No explanation given. "Why they're removing them, no one has said. We just know they removed them," one journalist was told when she phoned Dom Knigi. A customer, Margarita Varlamova, wrote on Facebook on April 23 that she had sought Maus in Dom Knigi, and when she couldn't find it, she asked staff. According to her account: "The clerk, avoiding eye contact, said, 'Come back after May 9.'" Moreover, the clerk said they had removed the book because of the swastika on the cover. Varlamova managed to convince the staff member to sell her a copy on the sly anyway (Berezina, "Komiks"). So: Mystery solved. The cover of the Russian Maus , like other editions throughout the world, sports a swastika with a stylized Hitler cat face. The Russian parliament one year before had passed the Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism, which punishes "the spreading of information on military and memorial commemorative dates related to Russia's defense that is clearly disrespectful of society, and to publicly desecrate symbols of Russia's military glory" (Kurilla, PONARS : 2). Individual store managers and salesclerks had evidently taken it upon themselves to withdraw the "inappropriate" item, at least for the duration of the Victory Day celebrations. The fact that other stores did have the book in stock and in plain view indicates that this was not a top-down, coordinated policy, but the actions of individuals leery of drawing the wrong kind of attention during the most "pro-Russia" time of year (Berezina, "Komiks"). The ad hoc nature of the phenomenon was confirmed when journalist Darya Peshchikova actually did find the book at Dom Knigi on April 26--but when she asked staff about reports it had been removed, "the salesclerk saw the swastika and pulled Maus from the shelf herself!" (Rothrock, "Gone"). ... Only the rare politically charged instances of censorship, such as that of Denis Lopatin's explicitly anti-government comics at the 2008 KomMissia (see Alaniz, Komiks : 218-219), could compare to what happened with Maus . But whereas those other cases never went beyond the confines of the local (a provincial city) or the elitist (the Moscow and St. Petersburg art scenes), Maus gate penetrated everywhere, involving well-known mainstream bookstore chains, eliciting media coverage throughout Russia (and worldwide). As Russian pop culture scholar Eliot Borenstein puts it: "You can tell a lot about a community based on what it decides to censor" ( Plots : 1). And so I repeat, comics in Russia now mattered. They mattered because--in a time-honored tradition--Russians of the twenty-first century, on a wide scale, once more considered them dangerous objects that had earned the right to be banned. (Even if informally, and on hysterical grounds.) To get to this point, where comics were newly deemed worthy of repression (as opposed to mere disdain), they had had to negotiate many twists, turns, and disasters since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Clearly Russia had changed since the early 1990s. What a long, strange trip it had been. Excerpted from Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia by José Alaniz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
