Russian war poet Gennady Rakitin has entered competitions, and been republished by many Z-propaganda magazines. He is also completely fictional, having been created by a group of pranksters. His poems, they revealed, were translations of Nazi verse published in the 1930s and 1940s.
Rakitin began posting his works on the Russian social media network, VKontakte, in the summer of 2023. His poems praised Wagner mercenaries, the Fatherland, and Vladimir Putin, and were celebrated at festivals and competitions. He soon became online friends with almost a hundred members of the State duma, and 28 senators.
On social media, Rakitin presented himself as a 49-year-old alumnus of the Philology Department of the Moscow State University. His profile picture shows a white-haired man with a modest beard.
The photo, it turns out, was generated by artificial intelligence, and 17 of the 18 poems published under his name were translated from Nazi authors. The group-who wish to remain anonymous for safety reasons-say they began their ruse after noticing parallels between Russian patriotism and Nazism. "We read collections of Z poetry and saw straight-up nazism there. We suspected that they probably wrote exactly the same things in Nazi Germany, and we turned out to be right," they said. "Politically, this shows that the ideas of Nazi Germany are close to the ideas of modern Russia, even as Russia claims it is fighting nazism. Culturally, it shows that there is no renaissance of Russian culture, as the authorities claim, but only its degradation."
The group disguised the translated poems by replacing Nazi imagery with references to present-day Russia. One work, originally written by dramatist and Nazi party member Eberhard Möller as The Führer, was refitted with a photo of Putin and a pro-war slogan.
Self-exiled Russian journalist Andrey Zakharov was the first to reveal that Rakitin was a fake persona. The group said that they wanted to end the charade because they had become exhausted "in the gloominess of Russian Z world." Before that, however, they posted Rakitin's final verse: "Gennady long mocked / Z poems on his feed / In the end, his message was / Fuck the war."
