Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- Potemkin, Grigori Aleksandrovich 1739-1791. Russian army officer and politician. The lover of Catherine II, he helped her seize power in 1762.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a Russian officer and politician who was a favorite of Catherine II and in 1762 helped her to seize power; when she visited the Crimea in 1787 he gave the order for sham villages to be built (1739-1791)
Examples
“By exaggerating Zimbabwe's crop yields in Potemkin fashion, the cabinet downplayed its needs, making it impossible for the WFP to get from donors (already stretched thin in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Liberia) the food Zimbabwe will need to stave off widespread starvation in 2004. 3.”
“In Rybczynski's film, the tourists are insulated from the events of Potemkin, which is the opposite of the effect Eisenstein was aiming for with his intensive montage techniques.”
“Mr. Medvedev himself has expressed disdain for the political showcases known as Potemkin villages, after the fake settlements erected by the minister Grigory Potemkin to ingratiate himself with Catherine the Great.”
“Instead, the head of the pollution monitoring center said Beijing had relied instead on another kind of Potemkin pollution solution ...”
Alex Pasternack: How Beijing Cleans Its Air (and Fakes It Too)
“The reforms were seen by one side as a total sham, a kind of Potemkin-village facade intended to deceive us; they were seen by the other as evidence that the whole decades-long conflict between our countries and our political values and systems had been miraculously - pouf!”
“EU Referendum: President "Potemkin" Putin skip to main | skip to sidebar”
“The economy is a kind of Potemkin Village: on the surface, it looks like the economy of an economic-sim game like Port Royale with many primary and secondary goods being produced and listed that evoke the setting and mood of the game.”
“There's really a kind of Potemkin village quality to the tolerance and acceptance" of gay people in America, said Clarence Patton, a spokesman for the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project.”
Real Lesbian & Gay Life: "Everything changes the minute we kiss."
“Might those students have been "Potemkin" protesters?”
"It is my honour to burn for the sake of the nation's ideals and defend the system."
“Hitler even built a "Potemkin" concentration camp, Theresienstadt, to show visiting human rights dignitaries and, one presumes, the 1940's ancestors of Klein and Yglesias, how good concentration camp inmates had it.”
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