Potemkin Village: A Useful Term for Our Time
Reading a story in the WSJ tonight I came across an excellent word that prompted me to delve into its meaning. That is, Potemkin Village. As in, ‘they planted a potemkin forest to block the highway.’ It goes back to Catherine the Great’s tour of Crimea in 1787, when a fake village was built, using facades of buildings, to impress the monarch and her travel party with the value of the her new conquests, enhancing her hosts’ standing in the empress’ eyes.
Later on, the Soviets built similar Potemkin Villages to fool visiting foreigners. Select villages, factories or schools were selected to be presented as typical, rather than exceptional. Other uses include places like Delaware or the Cayman Islands, where international companies base their headquarters but conduct their real business elsewhere.
As recently as the 2008 Olympics in Beijing the term came to life, when describing the host city as ‘kind of a Potemkin Olympic Village.’
December 10, 2009 @ 2:36 am
North Korea has one within eyeshot of the DMZ. Put up in the 1950s to "fool" South Koreans into thinking how great life is in the North.Spy photos clearly show no glass in the windows and with below freezing weather common to the area, obviously not a real village.They also have world's highest flag pole. They put up a big one and the South responded with a bigger one and it went back and forth until the South let them have the damn record.
December 10, 2009 @ 3:15 am
I'm always learning from you! Thank you!
December 10, 2009 @ 3:31 am
That post was written with you in mind Sony! Funny.
December 10, 2009 @ 6:49 pm
Grigori Potemkin, one of Catherine's 9many) boyfriends, was the one it was named after.