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.
Gennady Rakitin was set as a graduate of the Philology Department at Moscow State University.
The poem "Leader", which was posted with Putin's masculine picture, is actually "Fuhrer", an antisemitic Nazi propagandistic work written by Eberhard Wolfgang Möller in 1938.
[1] About 100 State Duma deputies, 30 senators, and several Kremlin officials were taken in and added Gennady Rakitin as "friends".
These include State Duma deputies Dmitry Kuznetsov and Nina Ostanina, senators Dmitry Rogozin and Andrey Klishas, Putin's cultural advisor Elena Yampolskaya, and pro-Kremlin "war correspondent" Yuri Kotenok.