The phrase “Global Potemkin Society” is an extension of the notion of “Potemkin Villages”. These derive their notoriety from a grand tour by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, of the newly conquered Crimea in 1787. The tour was organized by Prince Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin who is purporerted to have ensured that Catherine was only exposed to the prosperous villages along the route. Potemkin’s critics in the Imperial Court labeled these villages “Potemkin Villages” and claimed that they were actually inhabited by actors. It was further claimed that the building facades along the route were torn down after the tour passed through and then rebuilt ahead of the tour. Not wanting to disappoint the Empress he had assembled a number of mobile villages to be viewed from the imperial barge. As soon as it had passed out of sight Potemkin’s men stripped off their jolly peasant costumes, dismantled the villages and rebuilt them overnight further downstream. However, the principal dupes were foreign ambassadors. But this propensity for creating a sham for show, letting observers see what they want for the sake of what they are worth, has had other expressions throughout the centuries when pretentiously showy or imposing façades are designed to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.
Thereafter “Potemkin’s Village” became synonymous with autocratic attempts to create images that were designed both to hide the unpleasant realities of Russian life and to keep foreign eyes from detecting them.
Hmmm…I thought this was a fairly well-known (if somewhat exaggerated from reality) allusion. Then again, when yesterday I suggested that a contractor we were reviewing was engaging in “cargo cult engineering”[sup]*[/sup] I was faced with a conference table of blank looks, and then had to explain South Pacific cargo cults and John Frum, which kind of took the punchline out of the joke.
For the record, Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin make some very significant infrastructure and economic improvements to the newly annexed Crimea, which had been in left in ruins by the Ottomans and was largely disconnected from the rest of the world.
Stranger
[sup]*[/sup]I stand guilty of having pirated the term from Richard Feynman’s famous “Cargo Cult Science” commencement speech, which no one at the table had ever heard of, either. C’est la merde?
Once when I was watching a soccer game with some other people, they showed that one team had “ball possession 46%”. I exclaimed that this was even lousier than Hitler.
And yeah, nobody knew about this (speculation) either.
May I please steal this phrase for my next meeting with code developers? The chances of blank faces are high; however it describes the situation so fully that risk is worthwhile.
Interesting page, pity I don’t really function in the language, the pictures from the museum look absolutely fascinating. The scenic picture from the header of the page is beautiful.
When I read about this in one of those “historical anecdotes debunked” books, they traced the first appearances of the Potemkin villages to European journals, with the more-or-less obvious intention of making the Russians look bad - surely these uncivilised barbarians couldn’t have honestly built and developed large areas of land in short time, it had to be a sham! Similar to the way Catherine the Great was ridiculed with the story of the horse, to belittle her real (and impressive) accomplishments.