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It may never achieve the acclaimed status of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita but, like those 20th-century satirical masterpieces, a novel about a zombie apocalypse in Moscow has earned the wrath of Russian censors. In a sign of the intensifying crackdown on artistic creativity under Vladimir Putin, prosecutors have demanded that Ivan Filippov’s book Mouse should be withdrawn from sale in Russia on the grounds that it threatens public order.
Mouse tells the story of an infected rodent that escapes from a scientific institute where experts are developing a serum to prolong Putin’s life. In the ensuing chaos, most of Moscow’s residents turn into zombies that behave like mice. It is light-hearted stuff and, as a critique of contemporary Russian society, short of the standards set by weightier novels such as Sergei Lebedev’s Oblivion, published in 2011.
However, the authorities evidently wanted to catch Mouse in their trap — and Filippov may well have had an inkling of what was coming. A journalist and researcher, he fell foul of the Kremlin after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and moved abroad. In April, he was designated a “foreign agent” — a label applied to opponents of Putin that carries connotations of espionage and treason.
Filippov’s sin was to use the Telegram social media app as a platform for critical analysis of the torrents of war commentary and propaganda that appear on the site’s channels. In Russian, his own channel is called “Na Zzzzzapadnom fronte bez peremen”, which means “All quiet on the Wwwwwestern front”. This is a nod to Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 anti-war novel of that title, as well as to the “Z” symbol of militaristic nationalism that has come to the fore during the war in Ukraine.
Predictable though it was, the prosecutors’ move against Mouse also tells a tale about the shrinking space for free speech under Putin, while offering a chance to compare conditions today with those in past Russian political systems. In the years immediately after Putin’s assumption of power in 1999-2000, Russian authors were left more or less to their own devices. The Kremlin regarded literature as a minor irritant rather than a serious threat, taking the view that most Russians formed their political views under the influence of television and, later, the internet — media it kept under closer surveillance or control.
All that has changed, especially since the invasion of Ukraine and the accompanying militarisation of Russian society and the economy. Three months ago, a Moscow court ordered the arrest of Mikhail Zygar, the former editor-in-chief of the broadcaster TV Rain, on charges of spreading “false news” about Russia’s armed forces. Fortunately for Zygar, he now lives abroad — as does Grigory Chkhartishvili, a detective novelist who uses the name Boris Akunin, and was last year placed on an official list of “terrorists and extremists”.
Censorship and repression are now at levels resembling those in the post-Stalin years of the late 1950s and 1960s. In that era, Mikhail Suslov, a Kremlin ideologist, told Vasily Grossman that his epic novel Life and Fate was so subversive that it would remain unpublished at home for 200 years. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was banned for its less than positive depiction of the Bolshevik revolution. Both novels were published in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s as freedom of speech expanded under Mikhail Gorbachev.
The official attack on Mouse is not the first time in the history of Russian literature that animals have got an author into trouble. In a novel about the second world war, Anatoly Kuznetsov described the entry of Nazi forces into Kyiv in 1941 and included a paragraph about the large size of German horses. The censor complained that Kuznetsov was demeaning Russian horses.
