Russian Prosecutor:
Harry Potter Isn’t Satanic
Russian schoolchildren will still be able to read the adventures of wizard-in-training Harry Potter now that an attempt to ban the series was thwarted. The Moscow City Prosecutor’s Office declined December 31 to bring criminal hate-crime charges against Rosman Publishing for making available a Russian-language version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
The investigation began December 16 after an unidentified Moscow-area woman from the Tarusa chapter of the International Foundation for Slavic Writing and Culture filed charges that the book “instilled religious extremism and prompted students to join religious organizations of Satanist followers,” Svetlana Petrenko, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, stated. “The probe revealed that there were no grounds for a criminal case,” she added.
“Claims of Satanism are absolute nonsense,” Rosman spokeswoman Natalya Dolgova said in the December 24 Moscow Times. However, the alternative online publication PrimaNews theorized December 25 that the charges were a bit too reminiscent of the tactics of “Soviet times,” in which “works of art which happened to cause displeasure of the authorities . . . were immediately confiscated and banned ‘at request of outraged working people’” from bookstores and library circulation.
The article went on to note that the depiction of house-spirit Dobby in the film version closely resembles the main character of the Russian cartoon Kukly, which was unsuccessfully challenged in 1995 for “insulting the head of state,” Vladimir Putin.
Posted Janaury 6, 2003.
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