So who are the Nazis then?

Let’s start by stating that Gennady Rakitin has something in common with Homer and Shakespeare. At this point you’re supposed to ask, “Who’s that?” and “What do they have in common?”

Assuming that the first question is about the first name I mentioned and not the other two, Rakitin is a superpatriotic pro-Putin poet cum doggerel writer, whose verses have flooded Russian social media.

The poet has won numerous accolades, and thousands of followers befriended him electronically, including 100 MPs and 30 senators. One of his poems has even won a literary prize.

Impressive though this is, it’s still not enough, you’d think, to mention Rakitin in the same breath as Homer and Shakespeare, the greatest literary geniuses in history. However, Rakitin does have something in common with them and no, it’s not his mastery of versification.

Many unorthodox scholars doubt that Homer ever existed. They ascribe his work to anonymous collaborators, and the same posthumous fate befell Shakespeare. Though Will Shakespeare of Stratford did exist, his plays and sonnets are supposed to have been written by someone else, and the list of candidates is long.

Rakitin shares this enigmatic quality with the two geniuses, but that’s where his path diverges from theirs. For, while doubts about the identity of Homer and Shakespeare still persist in some quarters, those about Rakitin have been dispelled. He doesn’t exist.

Rakitin is a hoax expertly played by anti-Putin Russians on the gung-ho public. And his jingoistic verses are slightly adapted translations of Nazi poems from the 1930s and 1940s.

Thus the poem The Leader, describing Putin as “a gardener who harvests the fruits of his heavy labours …” was originally entitled Der Führer. It was written by Eberhard Möller, who way back then was churning out anti-Semitic verses and film scripts for Dr Goebbels.

Another poem, The Faceless PMC Soldier, glorified a Private Military Company mercenary killed fighting against Ukrainian Nazis. That work’s maiden name was The Faceless Stormtrooper, and its protagonist died fighting for, rather than against, Nazism.

Then there was an elegy entitled Before the Portrait and illustrated with a picture of Putin. The original by the Nazi writer Herybert Menzel was inspired by the portrait of another leader, a typological precursor of Putin.

The Rakitin affair makes yet another addition to the list of notable literary hoaxes. For example, the 18^th century literary world welcomed the discovery of the blind Scottish poet Ossian from the 3^rd century.

The epic poetry produced by ‘the Homer of the North’ thrilled Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson, and it inspired Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and the whole Romantic movement. Alas, Ossian never existed – he was the product of a clever literary hoax.

Neither was this literary genre unknown in Russia. In the 19^th century, A.K. Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers created Koz’ma Prutkov, the 18^th century author of pretentious verse, diaries and aphorisms. Most Russian readers were taken in, and the authors enjoyed a good laugh at the public’s expense.

The Bolshevik takeover, on the other hand, was no laughing matter. However, the need for plagiarised material became acute, what with proletarian poets and composers unable to keep up with the voracious appetites of Russia’s growth industry, propaganda.

During the Civil War, Bolshevik hacks ripped off many march songs of the tsarist and White armies. For example, one of the most popular songs of that period eulogised the Red Army storming a White stronghold in the Far East. In fact, that was the song of the Drozdov regiment in the White Army, and the new version changed only one word, replacing the Red colour of the stronghold with White.

Moving along this timeline, we get to the 1930s, a period most relevant to my today’s theme. As both the Nazis and the Soviets were preparing for war, they formed a sort of alliance based on ideological kinship and similar goals. Both predators were also stepping up their propaganda efforts, with patriotic songs in high demand.

At that time, the Red Air Force acquired its own theme song, which every Soviet child knew by heart well into the 1970s (I still remember all the blasted lyrics). The first line of its refrain went: “Still higher, still higher, still higher…”.

As it turned out later, that song was plagiarised from a Nazi original, whose first line was “Mein Führer, mein Führer, mein Führer…”. Birds of a feather sing together, to paraphrase ever so slightly.

The Rakitin hoax demonstrates the inherently Nazi nature of the Putin regime, for German hand-me-downs wouldn’t fit so snugly if the Russian body politic were fundamentally different. I’m still awaiting the arrival of Russland, Russland Über Alles in Russian, and I hope the wait won’t be too long.

This is all especially telling because officially Russia pounced on the Ukraine to de-Nazify her regime. Even though Gennady Rakitin never existed, he managed to provide a perfect illustration of the boot on the other foot, leaving one in no doubt as to which country needs de-Nazifying.

It’s wrong to ignore the differences among various fascist regimes, but ignoring the similarities is even worse. Because, if we don’t understand where such a regime comes from, we won’t know where it’s going. And when we finally determine that destination, it may be too late to do anything about it.