Word: potemkinism
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...newspaper's occasional exposés of individual wrongdoing designed to explain why Soviet central planners are unable to meet their goals. In the case of the factory that wasn't, Russians were inevitably reminded of the ruse employed by the 18th century courtier Grigori Potemkin, who erected false fronts on poverty-stricken villages in order to persuade Empress Catherine the Great that her realm was truly prosperous...
...Road-eh-oh) looks like any other shopping street in the fertile crescent of Beverly Hills. The buildings tend to be one-and two-story structures, pastel, neo-Spanish, neo-20th Century-Fox. Even the ficus trees lining the street seem to be part of a grand design by Potemkin. Still, the veteran spendthrift arriving on Rodeo Drive has a sense of déjà vu. No, the street does not possess the discreet elegance of Paris' Rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, the stylishness of Rome's Via Condotti or the hustling excitement of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. But the very...
...probably none have been writing about the "new" China with more skepticism than the Toronto Globe and Mail's Ross H. (for Howard) Munro. Since his arrival 2½ years ago in the Chinese capital, where he is the only resident North American journalist, Munro, 36, has reported on a Potemkin village in Inner Mongolia that he suspected was set up to mislead visiting foreigners, pieced together detailed accounts of Peking's struggle with trade deficits, and chronicled the attempts of Mao's successors to revise the Chairman's teachings. For his enterprise, Munro was pointedly dropped from a government press...
...Catherine actually at the point of deposing Potemkin? With a cool display of indifference, the prince spent most of the past month in a leisurely tour of his southern dominions. He has no intention, however, of staying away from the capital indefinitely. On his return to St. Petersburg, he is planning to move out of the Winter Palace?but only to a hotel near the Hermitage, which is connected to the palace by a private passage. Indeed, some court sources suggest that it was Potemkin himself who actually selected Secretary Zavadovsky as Catherine's new adjutant general because he knows...
...Catherine thought so highly of Potemkin that she exempted him from her standard practice of having a prospective new adjutant general first inspected by her Scottish physician, John Rogerson, for any signs of social diseases, and then "tried out" by her friend, Countess Praskovia Bruce, who is known in St. Petersburg as leprouveuse (literally, "the tester...