What are 'Potemkin villages' which were purportedly erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigori Potemkin to impress Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787?
Potemkin village the barge left, the village was disassembled, then rebuilt downstream overnight. Modern historians are divided on the degree of truth behind the Potemkin village story, and some writers argue that the story is an exaggeration. According to Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Potemkin's most comprehensive English-language biographer, the tale of elaborate, fake settlements with glowing fires designed to comfort the monarch and her entourage as they surveyed the barren territory at night, is largely fictional. Aleksandr Panchenko, an established specialist on 19th-century Russia, used original correspondence and memoirs to conclude that the Potemkin villages are a myth. He writes: "Based on the above
Potemkin village Potemkin village In politics and economics, a Potemkin village (also Potyomkin village, translated from the , "potyomkinskiye derevni") is any construction (literal or figurative) built solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is. 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