In politics and economics, a Potemkin village (Russian: потёмкинские деревни, romanized: potyómkinskiye derévni) is any construction (literal or figurative) whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country that is faring poorly, making people believe that the country is faring better. The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built by Grigory Potemkin, former lover of Empress Catherine II, solely to impress the Empress during her journey to Crimea in 1787. Modern historians agree that accounts of this portable village are exaggerated. The original story was that Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnipro River in order to impress the Russian Empress and foreign guests. The structures would be disassembled after she passed, and re