Kriegsbefürwortender russischer Dichter entlarvt als Anti-Putin-Falschmeldung unter Verwendung von Nazi-Gedichten

18 comments

1. **From The Telegraph:**

   A poet celebrated in Russia for glorifying the war in Ukraine has been revealed as the creation of an exiled anti-Putin journalist – and his works as translated poems from Nazi Germany.

   Starting in mid-2023, 18 poems appeared on the Kremlin’s version of Facebook in the name of “Gennady Rakitin”, saluting the heroic sacrifices of Russian soldiers and the noble leadership of Vladimir Putin.

   One of these, titled On Holy Night, described “whispering to a dear son for the last time and dying for our peaceful Donbas”. It has now been revealed as a tweaked translation of a poem written to inspire Nazi soldiers towards the end of the Second World War.

   Another, The Leader, was published next to a photograph of Putin sitting on a thicket of shrubs. It described the Russian president as a “gardener” reaping the “fruits of hard labour” who is loved by his people and whose “immortality is rising”.

   But this was not a new poem inspired by Putin’s invasion, it was a translation of a 1938 verse about Adolf Hitler written by Eberhard Moeller – an anti-Semite and Nazi propagandist – and Rakitin, its “author”, did not exist.

   Kremlin officials did not spot the ruse and instead lapped up the fake poetry, said Andrey Zakharov, the exiled Russian investigative journalist who invented Rakitin.

   “All these worthy people appreciated the patriotic position of the fake Rakitin,” he said on Friday after finally revealing his invention to Rakitin’s fans.

   Mr Zakharov, best known for exposing a Kremlin troll factory in St Petersburg, said 100 Russian MPs, 30 Senators and dozens of other Kremlin apparatchiks became Rakitin’s “friends” on the VKontakte social network.

   These included Elena Yampolskaya, Putin’s cultural adviser, and Dmitry Rogozin, a Russian senator who often posts photographs of himself posing in military uniform in occupied Donbas.

   So taken were the Russian authorities with Rakitin’s patriotic poems that they reached the semi-final of a competition for “poems about the defenders of the Motherland” and were republished by Z-propagandist magazines and Telegram channels.

   Mr Zakharov said he had invented Rakitin to humiliate the Kremlin, which has repeatedly justified its invasion of Ukraine as “fighting Nazis”.

   “Rakitin does not exist and all his poems, liked so much by MPs and Senators, are translations of poems by poets in Nazi Germany from the late 1930s and early 1940s,” he said.

   He exploited a drive to promote the war through art and culture by Russian “Z-propagandists” who had struggled to find patriotic poems to stir nationalistic feelings about defending the Motherland against “Ukrainian Nazis”.

   Mr Zakharov created the Rakitin profile on the VKontakte website with fake autobiographical information, a “terrible” AI-generated black-and-white profile picture which “merged the man’s beard and neck”, and the Nazi poems.

   “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 mercenary fighter’,” he said, in reference to Kremlin mercenaries.

   After Mr Zakharov had revealed Rakitin as his fake, he signed off with one final poem – the only one not stolen from the Nazis.

   “Gennady for a long time mocked the Z-poems on the wall,” the final poem said. “And in the end, he drew a d— for the war.”

2. The Russian inferiority complex makes them blind to their faults and incapable of admitting when they were wrong. (Much like MAGA.)

   This is why Russia will never be a superpower or a world leader to anyone other than those they conquer and sycophants leeching off of them.

3. Even the revealed answer is too sophisticated to be understood by fascist Putinites. All the smart Russians already left.

4. Lol. Putin taking inspiration from the nazi party. But i thought putin was fighting the nazis by invading a peaceful democratic country, killing its civilians and kidnapping its children.

5. Quality r/madlads troll work there … Shame it probably marked him for some polonium tea next to a 3rd story window.

6. Russians love poetry and literature.

7. I wonder if this will work here in Israel.

8. To be fair, they’re identical.

9. Hope this guy stays away from windows for the rest of his life. An epic troll.

10. Really shows the culture when nazi poems are winning competitions and are beloved by the leadership.

11. Well, you can translate almost any ultra-nationalistic works into the language of another fascist country and they’d probably work just fine. Extreme nationalism, tribalism and xenophobia have a common root in our human psyche. To a degree we are all vulnarable to these impulses.
    The problems are the so-called “leaders” who foster these impulses in order to maintain their own selfish desires for power.

    It’s ironic though that poetry extolling our differences only shows that on the dark side of our souls we are very much alike.

12. That’s actually hilarious

13. Using art as a form of resistance has historically been a russian specialty

14. This is what Kekistan tried to do, but ended up with Antifa ruining the ploy by doxing them all, while the media (CNN) grouped them in with neonazis. Was a good idea though, by genuinely good people.

15. This should be in r/murderedbywords

16. There must be someone doing the same type of rebranding here in the US because these MAGA sheep are gobbling it all up.

17. “Mr Zakharov created the Rakitin profile on the VKontakte website with fake autobiographical information, a “terrible” AI-generated black-and-white profile picture which “merged the man’s beard and neck”, and the Nazi poems.”

    A literal neckbeard

18. Putin does the same btw: https://youtu.be/Gst2qPRUuGE