🔗 Potemkin Village

🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Russia/language and literature of Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

In politics and economics, a Potemkin village is any construction (literal or figurative) whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better, although statistics and charts would state otherwise. The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built solely to impress Empress Catherine II by her former lover Grigory Potemkin, during her journey to Crimea in 1787. While modern historians claim accounts of this portable village are exaggerated, the original story was that Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the Russian Empress; the structures would be disassembled after she passed, and re-assembled farther along her route to be viewed again as if another example. The term is a translation of the Russian: потёмкинские деревни (IPA: /pɐˈtʲɵmkʲɪnskʲɪɪ dʲɪˈrʲɛvnʲɪ/; romanization: potyómkinskiye derévni).