Word: potemkinism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gorbachev by his own testimony was totally unprepared. To some scholars and Soviet officials that appears so odd as to suggest that the President himself had staged a Potemkin coup to win domestic and foreign sympathy. But that seems farfetched. More probably, the very volume and intensity of coup talk had dulled his political antennae; the cry of wolf was sounding old and tired. Alexander Yakovlev, a close adviser, claimed after it was all over that he had even given Gorbachev the names of some likely -- and, as it turned out actual -- plotters. The President, according to Yakovlev, had scoffed...
...built itself a Potemkin village, complete with a bank, drugstore, barbershop, pool hall, Greyhound bus station, coin-operated Laundromat and quiet residential streets. Several double-wide trailers and late-model automobiles, all seized from real-life crime scenes, sprawl around the town. Even the movie theater, the Biograph, is a monument to real-life crime. Its main attraction, Manhattan Melodrama (starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy), was showing at the Biograph in Chicago when the bank robber John Dillinger was shot dead outside the theater by FBI agents...