Gennady Rakitin

Gennady Rakitin (Russian: 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.^[1] 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.