Word: potemkinism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Klein completed the first movement of his Duo for Violin and Cello in November 1941, a month before he was sent to Theresienstadt. There he took part in the camp's Potemkin-village cultural scene, writing in a camp publication that "people who never lived here will look at the number of musical events here with wonder and amazement." He never finished the second movement: two minutes and 35 seconds into the lento, the music is cut off in mid-measure, mute testimony to catastrophe, as eloquent as any note ever written...
...cities, although the Gbadolite village airstrip can accommodate the supersonic Concorde that Mobutu charters from Air France as well as a number of Boeing jets in the presidential fleet. Exquisite flower gardens and vast plantations of pineapple imbue Gbadolite with an air of bucolic tranquillity. But it is a Potemkin village: most of the electricity is switched off when the dictator and his circle are absent, leaving thousands of townspeople to fend for themselves in the tropical darkness...
Russia's rulers have been so obsessed with the geography factor that they developed the most centralized system of control in human history. In reality, the notion that whatever Moscow dictated would automatically be done throughout the farthest reaches of the empire was a carefully fostered illusion. The Potemkin village was the inspired invention of a royal favorite seeking to delude Catherine the Great about the conditions of life in the hinterlands. During the Soviet era, local apparatchiks flooded Moscow with so many meaningless statistics that no one to this day knows the real state of the Russian economy...
...actual political effect, if any. What really won a place in the Bolshevik propaganda effort was photography and the new art of photocollage, brilliantly deployed -- in combination with sharp, eye-rattling typographic forms -- in book jackets, handbills and movie posters. Anton Lavinsky's 1926 poster for Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, which grabs the eye with the staring authority of those two black cannon muzzles framing the whispering, mutinous sailor, is a classic of the genre...
...cash to play for country -- or in fact its desecration, mere public relations puppets with which the Cuban government could show off its prowess to the world (while the rest of the island starved)? Were they the most professional amateurs you could ever hope to see, or an aging, Potemkin example of a state-sponsored system of shamateurism...