Anti-war activists dupe Russian officials with translations of Nazi poetry

In the summer of 2023, a poet by the name of Gennady Rakitin began publishing his “patriotic” works on VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook. He wrote about war, mercenaries killed in action, the Fatherland, and Russia’s “leader.” Russian lawmakers and senators soon began following his page en masse. And his poems were entered into competitions, celebrated at festivals, and shared on channels dedicated to “Z-poetry.” 

But it turns out that Gennady Rakitin doesn’t exist. According to Russian journalist Andrey Zakharov, some of his acquaintances are behind the account — and these anti-war activists have actually been publishing translations of poetry written in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. 

The Gennady Rakitin page has an AI-generated profile picture and includes only sparse details about the “poet,” describing him as a 49-year-old who graduated from the Philology Department at Moscow State University. But this was enough to fool dozens of Russian senators and lawmakers, who added Rakitin as a “friend.” 

Rakitin’s friends list includes Russian senators Dmitry Rogozin and Andrey Klishas, State Duma deputies Dmitry Kuznetsov and Nina Ostatina, Putin’s cultural advisor Elena Yampolskaya, and pro-Kremlin “war correspondent” Yuri Kotenok. Zakharov counted a total of 95 State Duma lawmakers and 28 senators among Rakitin’s followers. The account’s creators said that they started out by adding “various public figures and just random people” as friends. “When a critical mass of well-known names was reached, we went after lawmakers and other celebrities,” they explained. The activists also claimed that they “didn’t invest a dime” in promoting the page. 

The works published on Rakitin’s profile include, for example, a translation of Eberhard Möller’s poem “The Führer” — accompanied by a photo of Vladimir Putin emblazoned with a pro-war slogan. Zakharov described Möller as a “committed Nazi and anti-Semite, who became a member of the Nazi Party even before Hitler came to power.” On February 23, 2024, a VKontakte group called “SVO. Quotes from Vladimir Putin. Russia” shared the translation of Möller’s poem to its 112,000 followers. 

The Rakitin page also shared a translation of a poem by Herybert Menzel, a German writer who joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and later became a Stormtrooper. The original poem in question was inspired by a portrait of Adolf Hitler and includes reflections on “what it means to be a son of Germany.” Another Rakitin poem takes a work by Nazi songwriter Heinrich Anacker and replaces the title “Faceless Stormtrooper” with “Faceless PMC Soldier” (a reference to Russian mercenaries fighting in Ukraine). 

Rakitin only “wrote” 18 poems in total, but they’ve made a splash in pro-war poetry competitions and festivals. In early June, one of Rakitin's poems won a prize at an All-Russian Patriotic Poetry Competition held by the Kaluga branch of the Professional Writers’ Union, reaching the semifinals in the “Poems about war and defenders of the Motherland” category. The magazine Moskva entered another one of Rakitin’s poems into a “Patriotic free verse” competition.