Potemkin village

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

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, 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

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

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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

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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

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

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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

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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

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, 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

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

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann  · 17 Jun 2019

actually run on outside lab equipment that Theranos purchased through a shell company. The Enron and Theranos tactics both exemplify another dark pattern, called a Potemkin village, which is something specifically built to convince people that a situation is better than it actually is. The term is derived from a historically questionable

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tale of a portable village built to impress Empress Catherine II on her 1787 visit to Crimea. Nevertheless, there are certainly real instances of Potemkin villages, including a village built by North Korea in the 1950s near the DMZ to lure South Korean soldiers to defect, and, terribly, a Nazi-designed

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in World War II fit to show the Red Cross, which actually disguised a way station to Auschwitz. In film, The Truman Show depicts a Potemkin village on a massive scale, where the character Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) resides in an entirely fake town filled with actors as part of

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development of, 294 personas for, 300 types of, 298–300 winner-take-most markets and, 308 Cutco, 217 Danziger, Shai, 63 dark patterns, 226–29 Potemkin villages, 228–29 Darley, John, 259 Darwin, Charles, 100, 101, 291 data, 130–31, 143, 146, 301 binary, 152 dredging of, 169–70 in graphs, see

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in, 216 predictions in, 206 polls and surveys, 142–43, 152–54, 160 approval ratings, 152–54, 158 employee engagement, 140, 142 postmortems, 32, 92 Potemkin village, 228–29 potential energy, 112 power, 162 power drills, 296 power law distribution, 80–81 power vacuum, 259–60 practice, deliberate, 260–62, 264, 266

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

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

your pilot that; I don’t want to tell you,” he replied, because he didn’t want to give the president time to construct a Potemkin village for his inspection. Diem played along, assigning his secretary of defense, Nguyen Dinh Thuan, to accompany Lansdale, and even providing some sandwiches for them to

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

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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

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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

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