Petersburg’s migrant poets published Nazi poems for a year, passing them off as Z-poetry, to show the war supporters the true meaning of Russian aggression. They somewhat recharacterized German poems written by the Nazis to present them as patriotic works supporting Russian military aggression. This stunt was aimed at exposing the hypocrisy and true nature of the propaganda supporting the war.
During the year, the fake poet Gennady Rakitin glorified the war and Russian aggression in pathetic poems, which he published on social networks on fabricated accounts. He had an impeccable “biography” of a teacher who retired and devoted his life to Z-poetry, a forged passport and an avatar photo generated by artificial intelligence – a kind of noble old man with a beard, an ideal patriot and humanitarian. Rakitina even “created” a brother who participates in “SVO” so that there would be someone to write for in the “Letters to a Brother” series. The Russian authorities were so fascinated by Rakitin’s patriotic poems that they entered the semi-finals of the “poems about defenders of the Motherland” contest, were reprinted by Z-propagandist magazines and a number of Telegram channels. More than a hundred deputies of the State Duma and several dozen senators subscribed to the fake poet on social networks. Among them are Putin’s cultural adviser Elena Yampolska and Dmytro Rogozin, a Russian senator who often publishes photos of himself posing in military uniform in occupied Donbas. All of them closely followed the updates of the “genius of words”, who published 18 poems since June 2023. In the end, it turned out that all of them are slightly altered poems of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. And Rakitin himself is a project of St. Petersburg poets in exile, who in this way decided to prove to Putin’s sympathizers the true essence of his politics.
Germany in Rakitin’s poems is replaced by Russia, details of the war in Ukraine are added, but in general the style and pathos of the Nazi poets are preserved. For example, the poem “On a holy night” describes the last whisper of those who “died for our peaceful Donbas”. It is nothing more than a modified translation of a poem written to inspire Nazi soldiers at the end of World War II. The poem “Leader”, dedicated to Putin, is actually a poem about Hitler, where he is depicted as a “gardener” who reaps “the fruits of hard work” and whose “immortality grows”. It belongs to the pen of Eberhard Möller – one of the most famous authors of the Nazi era and a consultant to the theater department in the Imperial Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda.
As reported The Guardian, exiled Russian investigative journalist Andriy Zakharov, involved in the creation of the poetic fake, was the first to publicly state that Rakitin is a fake persona. After self-exposure, he posted on his Vkontakte page the last poem that did not belong to the work of the Nazis. The poem turned out to be anti-war. Actually, in the last lines from Rakitin, Zakharov reported: “Hennadiy mocked the Z-verses on the wall for a long time…” and finally curses the war.
Authors of literary mystification believe that they have achieved their goal, because they have shown a wide audience what it actually supports.
“We read Z’s poetry collections and saw blatant Nazism there. We suspected they probably wrote the exact same thing in Nazi Germany, and it turns out we were right.” the group behind the project said in written responses to questions Guardian.
“Voice of America” considers poetic hoax as part of the total use of fakes and deepfakes for political purposes.
“While the Kremlin was using deepfake technologies against the US, Russian Z-patriots were lured to the site of a fictional poet who ‘wrote’ Nazi poems about the greatness of Putin and Russia,” the publication notes.
The fact that the Nazi poems were favorably received by the Russian leadership, joyfully picked up by the public, and disseminated by the media once again proves that such phenomena as extreme nationalism, tribalism and xenophobia have their roots in the collective human psyche. The problem here is the so-called national “leaders” who fuel these impulses to support unhealthy selfish desires for power.
