Gennady Rakitin

Gennady Rakitin (Геннадий Ракитин) is a hoax and the name of a fictional Russian poet created by an anonymous group of anti-Putin Russian exiles led by Andrey Zakharov. In mid-2023, they began to translate Nazi propagandistic poems, written in the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi Germany to celebrate Nazism, fascism, and to honor Adolf Hitler, into Russian with minimal changes and published those poems as patriotic verses celebrating Russia's war in Ukraine and the Russian leader and President Vladimir Putin on a Russian social media platform. The barely disguised Nazi poems drew significant attention in Russia, duping people from all walks of society that include Kremlin officials and nearly a hundred State Duma deputies and even winning some influential poetry competition awards. In June 2024, tired of moral exhaustion, the Russian exiles finally revealed the non-existence of Gennady Rakitin and the Nazi provenance of those patriotic poems. According to the participants, this hoax was created to debunk Putin's claim of anti-Nazism in Russian invasion of Ukraine and prove that modern mainstream Russian culture has so much in common with Nazism.

Hoax
The Russian anti-Putin exiles created a 49-year-old poet named Gennady Rakitin with his black-and-white image created with AI. Gennady Rakitin was set as a graduate of the Philology Department at Moscow State University. In mid-2023, they published 18 poems on VKontakte to "pay tribute" to the "heroic sacrifices" of Russian soldiers in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the "great leader" Vladimir Putin. In fact, these verses were translations of Nazi Germany's propaganda written in the 1930s and 1940s with minimal changes such as replacing "Germany", "Hitler" and "nameless Storm Troopers" with "Russia", "Putin" and "nameless Wagner Group mercenaries". One poem "Leader", which was posted with Putin's masculine picture, is actually "Fuhrer", an anti-Semitic Nazi propagandistic work written by Eberhard Wolfgang Möller in 1938. Möller had joined the Nazi Party even before Hitler came to power. Other Nazi authors include Herybert Menzel, a Sturmabteilung member who joined Nazi Party in 1933, and Heinrich Anacker, a Nazi songwriter.

Impact
The verses were reposted on VKontakte by many. About 100 State Duma deputies, 30 Senators, and not a few Kremlin officials were taken in and added Gennady Rakitin as "friends". These people include State Duma deputies Dmitry Kuznetsov and Nina Ostanina, Russian senators Dmitry Rogozin and Andrey Klishas, Putin’s cultural advisor Elena Yampolskaya, and pro-Kremlin “war correspondent” Yuri Kotenok.

Meanwhile, in June 2024, one of Rakitin's poems won a prize at an All-Russian Patriotic Poetry Competition held by the Union of Writers of Russia Kaluga branch, reaching the semifinals in the “Poems about war and defenders of the Motherland” category. One of the poems also won the Tvardovsky Patriotic Poetry Competition.