Published on VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, eighteen times, the poems of Rakitin have included one called “Leader.” Originally titled “Führer” and written by the fervent Nazi Eberhard Möller in the 1930s, it was posted alongside a typically masculine photograph of President Vladimir Putin posing in a forest.
Another poem, “Faceless Stormtrooper,” was repackaged as a celebration of Russian mercenaries fighting in Ukraine, while one more, adjusted for the Russian reader, spoke of “whispering to a dear son for the last time and dying for our peaceful Donbas.”
Lapped up by leading Russian politicians, 95 MPs and 28 senators befriended the fictional Rakitin on VKontakte, among them Yelena Yampolskaya, Putin’s cultural advisor, and Dmitry Rogozin, a 60-year-old senator partial to dressing up as a frontline soldier.
State Duma Deputy Vladimir Koshelev was also duped and has since promised to “smack the poet in the face” in the event he ever meets him.
Finally unmasking himself last Friday, Rakitin revealed himself to be Andrey Zakharov, a former BBC correspondent who fled to the U.K. shortly after being placed on the Kremlin’s list of “foreign agents” in 2021.
Two years later, Zakharov began translating Nazi poetry and modifying it with patriotic Russians in mind. Posted by fellow activists, the first poem was published last summer and attributed to the imaginary Gennady Rakitin.
To give Rakitin’s VKontakte profile a touch more credence, Zakharov says his friends added what he describes as a “terrible” AI image.
Ignoring the subtle giveaways, the Russian public embraced the flowery verse of Rakitin, with the phony poet even winning a prize in June at an All-Russian Patriotic Poetry Competition organized by the Professional Writers’ Union.
Zakharov has since explained that he was inspired to create Rakitin after watching the Kremlin hijack art and culture to “stir nationalistic feelings.”
He added: “Rakitin does not exist, and all his poems, liked so much by MPs and Senators, are translations of poems by Nazi poets from the late 1930s and early 1940s. Clearly, it is not difficult to pass off one patriotic poem for another. Germany is replaced with Russia and, for example, the ‘nameless stormtrooper’ becomes the ‘nameless Wagner fighter’.”
Calling his poetry campaign “a work of conceptual anti-war art,” Zakharov has finally pulled the curtain on his alter-ego, but not before publishing one final poem—the only one not sourced from the Third Reich: “Gennady long mocked / Z poems on his feed / In the end, his message was / F**k the war.”
