adj. sham, insubstantial; consisting of little or nothing behind an impressive facade
—Oxford English Dictionary
Anyone trying to sell a house should know the subtle
tricks for sprucing up a shabby property—toothpaste for wall cracks, shoe
polish for hardwood scratches, and baking cookies to mask the odor of
incontinent pets. Some scholars believe (although the historical record is
sparse and there is ample evidence to the contrary) that Grigory Potemkin may
have pulled the greatest bait and switch in history when he built entire bogus
villages in the arid wasteland of southwestern Ukraine to impress his boss and
sugar mama—Catherine the Great.
Potemkin was born to a military family along the Dnieper
River in western Russia in 1739. He would eventually be part of the 1762 coup
that overthrew the hapless Peter III and put Peter’s opportunistic wife,
Catherine II (soon to be “Great”), on the throne, ushering in a new era of sex
and statesmanship that would last for more than thirty years. Catherine
liberally commingled her public and private lives, vocally proclaiming that she
and Peter had never consummated their marriage (despite the existence of their
“son,” Paul) and enjoying affairs with multiple advisers and supporters—though,
strangely and ironically, not one of the most legendary
philanderers of the age (see Casanova). Catherine
called upon Potemkin for military guidance when her crown was threatened in the
early 1770s, and the two inevitably became lovers.
Within a decade, the flagging powers of the Ottoman Empire
(see ottoman) and others ceded control of an enormous
swath of land, almost a quarter of a million square miles, to Russia as
Catherine expanded her empire ever south and west. Catherine named Potemkin a
prince of the Holy Roman Empire and directed him to rule the vast, treeless
steppes of southern Ukraine and annex the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea (see
also cardigan). History gets a little murky at this
point, depending on who is doing the telling, but Potemkin’s detractors claim
that when Catherine and several foreign dignitaries visited the barren
flatlands under his control, Potemkin built entirely fake settlements with
glowing fires and mobile herds of animals to make the desolate prairies look
more inhabited. What is probably more likely is that Catherine was either party
to the ruse (hoping to impress her entourage) or that Potemkin did little more
than encourage his denizens to bring some spit and polish to their rural
outpost.
Unfortunately, as is the case with many negative eponyms,
whether or not the story is true is less important than the fact that it is how
most of history remembers Potemkin. Fairly or not, today his name is invoked
politically to represent what is believed to be a superficial cover-up of any
undesirable truth, applied to everything from the Olympic Village constructed
in Beijing in 2008 back to the concentration camps where the Nazis allowed
visits during World War II.
Still, despite his notorious namesake, his alleged
venereal disease, and the undisputed fact that he lost his marbles near the end
of his life, it is safe to say that Potemkin has fared better historically than
Catherine the Great. Despite overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence to the
contrary, many still claim she died after failed fornication with a horse.