Pranksters reveal odes to Putin were Russian translations of Nazi verse

The patriotic poetry of Gennady Rakitin has won him quite a following in Russia over the past year. His odes to Vladimir Putin and emotive verses in support of Russia’s war in Ukraine drew appreciation on social media and even the occasional honourable mention in Russian poetry prizes.

But Rakitin’s admirers did not realise one thing: the 18 poems published under his name were in fact Russian translations of Nazi verses penned in the 1930s and 1940s.

One, called Leader, and published with a photograph of Putin, was originally called Führer and written by the Nazi-supporting writer Eberhard Möller in the late 1930s. Another, an ode to Nazi stormtroopers, was translated into Russian and repurposed as a tribute to fighters from the Wagner paramilitary group.

Rakitin does not exist. He was invented by a group of anonymous pranksters, who wanted to demonstrate that “Z propaganda”, named after the Z symbol of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the dominant force in the Russian cultural scene, has more than a faint echo of fascism.