Artemy M. Kalinovsky

“For critics, tours of industrial facilities and model collective farms organized for visitors from abroad and particularly the developing world had all the hallmarks of Catherine the Great touring the Potemkin villages—facades of model villages created for the empress to behold as she toured her empire. Yet as Michael David-Fox writes, Potemkin villages, in the sense that the term is popularly understood—hastily constructed temporary facades erected to create an illusion—simply did not exist. Rather, the villages had been decorated in advance of Catherine’s visit. The trope of Potemkin villages was born out of diplomatic strife and revived by the USSR’s enemies in the twentieth century as a way to disparage Moscow’s presentation of its achievements to the outside world.”
― Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan