Potemkin village

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description: structure built solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is

93 results

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian  · 4 Apr 2023  · 360pp  · 107,124 words

leave to pay the subsidies? The government’s own consultants conceded that “only some areas can get priority.”34 The zones seemed like window displays—Potemkin villages of the free market.35 But what if we took Butler’s idea of the “political animal” seriously? One geographer proposed that the zones were

Europe: A History

by Norman Davies  · 1 Jan 1996

’s lover at the time, it is not possible to believe that she was ignorant of the ploy; the principal dupes were the foreign ambassadors. ‘Potemkin Villages’ has become a byword for the long Russian tradition of deception and disinformation.1 Force and fraud are the stock-in-trade of all dictatorships

Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence

by Yaroslav Trofimov  · 9 Jan 2024  · 399pp  · 112,620 words

empress, Catherine the Great, Potemkin had governed that part of Ukraine after Russia detached it from Ottoman Turkey in 1774—and erected the famously fake “Potemkin villages” to impress the empress during her tour of the newly acquired parts of the realm. The Potemkine operation allowed the Ukrainians to threaten supply routes

, 255 Poroshenko, Petro, xiii, 16, 20, 219, 356 author’s meeting with, 1–3 election of 2019, 1, 20–21, 79, 150 Potemkin, Grigoriy, 248 “Potemkin villages,” 248 Potemkine, 248–50, 264, 274 POWs (prisoners of war), 125, 172, 243–44, 279–80 prisoner exchanges, 21, 52, 163, 226, 279–80, 336

Gorbachev: His Life and Times

by William Taubman

a city in 1785. At its center was one of several fortresses built along a line from Azov to Mozdok by Prince Grigory Potemkin (of Potemkin village fame), at the bidding of his lover, Empress Catherine the Great, to defend the southern border of the Russian Empire. Cossacks settled the area, eventually

inequality” only hint at the gross inequality between town and country, which official ideology pledged to reduce. Reading between the lines, one can detect the Potemkin-village nature of libraries, clinics, nurseries, and old-age homes that barely deserved their names.86 Raisa Gorbachev had made herself into an accomplished social scientist

devoted a lot of time to concealing the full extent of the mess around the plant. As Chernyaev put it, “They had already set up ‘Potemkin villages’ before he arrived.”102 Visiting the home of an “ordinary worker,” Gorbachev was served lavish hors d’oeuvres, candies, and other delicacies. Boldin recalls that

, 532, 578, 585, 598, 680 Porgorny, Nikolai, 174 Porotov, Nikolai, xxi, 77, 78, 135 “Portrait of Gorbachev,” 454 Portugalov, Nikolai, xxi, 492 Potemkin, Grigory, 10 “Potemkin villages,” 10, 113, 235 Powell, Charles, xxi, 198, 199, 200, 390, 391 Powell, Colin, xxi, 402, 408, 409, 412, 682 Pozgay, Imre, xxi, 483 Prague, 45

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

by Edward L. Glaeser  · 1 Jan 2011  · 598pp  · 140,612 words

New York, may have replaced unattractive slums with shiny new buildings, but it did little to address urban decline. Those shiny new buildings were really Potemkin villages spread throughout America, built to provide politicians with the appearance of urban success. But Detroit had plenty of buildings; it didn’t need more. What

Pittsburgh plague Plato police policies, see public policies politics ethnic power and social groups and Ponti, Gio populations: loss of new building and wages and Potemkin villages Poulsen, Valdemar Poundbury poverty rural suburban poverty, urban African Americans and and attraction of poor to cities education and in favelas and helping people vs

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

by James C. Scott  · 8 Feb 1999  · 607pp  · 185,487 words

stubborn social realities and material facts. One response to this frustration is a retreat to the realm of appearances and miniatures-to model cities and Potemkin villages, as it were.1' It is easier to build Brasilia than to fundamentally transform Brazil and Brazilians. The effect of this retreat is to create

painful memories of the dire consequences of many state schemes, most of which had miscarried. 48. Elsewhere, in Tanga for example, there are cases of "Potemkin villages" being created for a Nyerere visit and dismantled later. See Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania, pp. 101-8. 49. Mwapachu, "Operation Planned Villages," quoted in

Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway  · 18 Oct 2017  · 778pp  · 239,744 words

a staggering violence. (She died of a stroke. There was, contrary to the prurient slander, no horse penis involved.) In short, I have been building Potemkin villages: faking it. The trouble is that with Gnomon in my head, and now with the crash dive, I’ve run out of places to put

The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen  · 5 Jan 2015  · 361pp  · 81,068 words

employed by Catherine’s autocratic regime. Samuel worked for Count Grigory Potemkin, one of Catherine’s many lovers, whose name has been immortalized for his “Potemkin villages” of fake industrialization he built to impress her. Potemkin gave Bentham the job of managing Krichev, his hundred-square-mile estate on the Polish border

Imagining India

by Nandan Nilekani  · 25 Nov 2008  · 777pp  · 186,993 words

IT systems. Beyond our capital markets, the 1990s saw countless instances of failed IT initiatives. We have struggled here with what Keniston called India’s “Potemkin village” problem—we have plenty of showcase “pilot projects” that we have failed to expand beyond a state or city level. More than 80 percent of

parties; populist; regional ; see also government, Indian pollution Pondicherry pongamia Pope, Carl Population Bomb,The (Ehrlich) ports post offices Post-War Plan of Educational Development “Potemkin village” problem Prabhu, Suresh Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana Prahalad. K. Praj Industries Prasad, Chandrabhan Prasad, Kalka Prasad, Rajendra Pratham preventive health care price controls prices

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin  · 14 Oct 2004  · 1,509pp  · 416,377 words

very sharp indeed. I was not the first visitor to wonder whether the authorities had arranged for visitors to see only showplaces, built—like a Potemkin village of Czarist Russia—to disguise underlying poverty and impress the credulous. My chance to take an unguided tour came after I realized that my hosts

Il-sung’s vastly more splendid isolation in real palaces—combined with the efforts of underlings to report only good news and expose him to Potemkin villages that oozed fake prosperity—kept the Great Leader from realizing the full extent of his people’s plight. There is other evidence, however, that even

Jong-il, 397 See also Public Security; punishment; purges; State Security; surveillance political offenders. See punishment; purges; surveillance post–Korean War period (1950s), 93–119 Potemkin villages, 178, 499, 518–519 power, electric, 177 Kim Il-sung’s priority use of, 499–500 Pyongyang system modernized, 662 shortage, 295, 329, 345, 503

Designing Social Interfaces

by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone  · 30 Sep 2009  · 518pp  · 49,555 words

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot  · 9 Jan 2018  · 972pp  · 259,764 words

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann  · 17 Jun 2019

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy

by Michael Barber  · 12 Mar 2015  · 350pp  · 109,379 words

A History of Future Cities

by Daniel Brook  · 18 Feb 2013  · 489pp  · 132,734 words

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order

by Parag Khanna  · 4 Mar 2008  · 537pp  · 158,544 words

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie  · 8 Oct 2019

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics

by Rory Stewart  · 13 Sep 2023  · 534pp  · 157,700 words

Emergence

by Steven Johnson  · 329pp  · 88,954 words

The Habsburgs: To Rule the World

by Martyn Rady  · 24 Aug 2020  · 461pp  · 139,924 words

The Smartest Guys in the Room

by Bethany McLean  · 25 Nov 2013  · 778pp  · 233,096 words

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

by Patrick McGee  · 13 May 2025  · 377pp  · 138,306 words

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson  · 5 Feb 2019  · 280pp  · 83,299 words

The Cold War: A New History

by John Lewis Gaddis  · 1 Jan 2005  · 392pp  · 106,532 words

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000

by Paul Kennedy  · 15 Jan 1989  · 1,477pp  · 311,310 words

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

by Misha Glenny  · 3 Oct 2011  · 274pp  · 85,557 words

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime

by Bradley Hope  · 1 Nov 2022  · 257pp  · 77,612 words

Halting State

by Charles Stross  · 9 Jul 2011  · 350pp  · 107,834 words

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn

by Chris Hughes  · 20 Feb 2018  · 173pp  · 53,564 words

Give People Money

by Annie Lowrey  · 10 Jul 2018  · 242pp  · 73,728 words

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956

by Anne Applebaum  · 30 Oct 2012  · 934pp  · 232,651 words

Vanishing New York

by Jeremiah Moss  · 19 May 2017  · 479pp  · 140,421 words

The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River

by Dan Morrison  · 11 Aug 2010  · 307pp  · 102,734 words

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

by James Howard Kunstler  · 31 May 1993

Roads to Berlin

by Cees Nooteboom and Laura Watkinson  · 2 Jan 1990  · 378pp  · 120,490 words

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

by Rose George  · 13 Oct 2008  · 346pp  · 101,255 words

Braiding Sweetgrass

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America

by Jon C. Teaford  · 1 Jan 2006  · 395pp  · 115,753 words

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger  · 28 Jun 2020

Armed Humanitarians

by Nathan Hodge  · 1 Sep 2011  · 390pp  · 119,527 words

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker  · 1 Jan 2002  · 901pp  · 234,905 words

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

by Scott Anderson  · 5 Aug 2013

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein  · 17 Aug 2020

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea

by Steve Levine  · 23 Oct 2007  · 568pp  · 162,366 words

The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union

by Serhii Plokhy  · 12 May 2014

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking  · 15 Mar 2018

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze  · 15 Nov 2021  · 561pp  · 138,158 words

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America

by Cass R. Sunstein  · 6 Mar 2018  · 434pp  · 117,327 words

My Father's Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer's

by Sandeep Jauhar  · 11 Apr 2023  · 220pp  · 67,661 words

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

by Steven Levy  · 12 Apr 2011  · 666pp  · 181,495 words

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

by Chrystia Freeland  · 11 Oct 2012  · 481pp  · 120,693 words

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child

by Morgan G. Ames  · 19 Nov 2019  · 426pp  · 117,775 words

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

by Steven Brill  · 5 Jan 2015  · 554pp  · 167,247 words

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives

by Sasha Abramsky  · 15 Mar 2013  · 406pp  · 113,841 words

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory

by Andrew J. Bacevich  · 7 Jan 2020  · 254pp  · 68,133 words

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America

by Mehrsa Baradaran  · 7 May 2024  · 470pp  · 158,007 words

The Cigarette: A Political History

by Sarah Milov  · 1 Oct 2019

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia

by Ray Taras  · 15 Dec 2009  · 267pp  · 106,340 words

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut

by Mike Mullane  · 24 Jan 2006  · 506pp  · 167,034 words

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition

by Robert N. Proctor  · 28 Feb 2012  · 1,199pp  · 332,563 words

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War

by Benn Steil  · 13 Feb 2018  · 913pp  · 219,078 words

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine

by Peter Lunenfeld  · 31 Mar 2011  · 239pp  · 56,531 words

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole  · 22 Jan 2018  · 200pp  · 64,329 words

The Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole  · 2 Oct 2019

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common

by Alan Greenspan  · 14 Jun 2007

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

by Michael Lewis  · 1 Nov 2009  · 265pp  · 93,231 words

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman  · 17 Jul 2023  · 329pp  · 99,504 words

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril

by Satyajit Das  · 9 Feb 2016  · 327pp  · 90,542 words

Madoff: The Final Word

by Richard Behar  · 9 Jul 2024

Why Wall Street Matters

by William D. Cohan  · 27 Feb 2017  · 113pp  · 37,885 words

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It)

by William Poundstone  · 1 Jan 2010  · 519pp  · 104,396 words

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice

by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi  · 16 Oct 2017  · 1,544pp  · 391,691 words

Owning the Sun

by Alexander Zaitchik  · 7 Jan 2022  · 341pp  · 98,954 words

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth

by Dan McCrum  · 15 Jun 2022  · 361pp  · 117,566 words

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

by Laura Shin  · 22 Feb 2022  · 506pp  · 151,753 words

Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson  · 19 May 2015  · 945pp  · 292,893 words

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard

by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel  · 3 Oct 2016  · 504pp  · 126,835 words

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century

by Francis Fukuyama  · 7 Apr 2004

Lethal Passage

by Erik Larson  · 27 Jul 2011  · 291pp  · 87,296 words

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

by Jimmy Soni  · 22 Feb 2022  · 505pp  · 161,581 words

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

by Victor Davis Hanson  · 15 Nov 2021  · 458pp  · 132,912 words

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

by Brad Stone  · 10 May 2021  · 569pp  · 156,139 words

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

by David Gerard  · 23 Jul 2017  · 309pp  · 54,839 words

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It

by Steven Brill  · 28 May 2018  · 519pp  · 155,332 words

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle

by Jeff Flake  · 31 Jul 2017  · 138pp  · 43,748 words

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning

by Justin E. H. Smith  · 22 Mar 2022  · 198pp  · 59,351 words

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order

by Benn Steil  · 14 May 2013  · 710pp  · 164,527 words

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

by Scott Rosenberg  · 2 Jan 2006  · 394pp  · 118,929 words

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

by Harvey Silverglate  · 6 Jun 2011  · 389pp  · 136,320 words

Poverty for Profit

by Anne Kim  · 384pp  · 112,825 words

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder

by Mark O'Connell  · 27 Jun 2023  · 245pp  · 82,536 words

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle

by Diana B. Henriques  · 1 Aug 2011  · 598pp  · 169,194 words

Siege: Trump Under Fire

by Michael Wolff  · 3 Jun 2019  · 359pp  · 113,847 words