Anti-war activists deceive Russian officials with translations of Nazi poems — Meduza

In the summer of 2023, a poet named Gennady Rakitin began publishing his “patriotic” works on VKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook. He wrote about war, mercenaries killed in battle, the Fatherland, and Russia’s “leaders.” Soon, Russian deputies and senators began to follow his page en masse. And his poems were submitted to contests, celebrated at festivals, and shared on channels dedicated to “Z-poetry.”

But it turns out that Gennady Rakitin doesn’t exist at all. According to Russian journalist Andrei Sakharov, some of his acquaintances are behind the account – and these anti-war activists have actually published translations of poems written in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

Gennady Rakitin’s page has an AI-generated profile picture and contains scant details about the “poet.” He is described as a 49-year-old who studied at the Philology Faculty of Moscow State University. But that was enough to fool dozens of Russian senators and deputies, who added Rakitin as a “friend.”

Rakitin’s friends list includes Russian senators Dmitry Rogozin and Andrei Klishas, ​​Duma deputies Dmitry Kuznetsov and Nina Ostatina, Putin’s cultural adviser Elena Yampolskaya and pro-Kremlin “war correspondent” Yuri Kotenok. Zakharov counted a total of 95 Duma deputies and 28 senators among Rakitin’s followers. The account’s creators said they initially added “various public figures and just random people” as friends. “When a critical mass of well-known names was reached, we turned to deputies and other celebrities,” they explained. The activists also claimed they had not invested “a cent” in promoting the page.

For example, works published on Rakitin’s profile include 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 “convinced 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 with his 112,000 followers.