Russia’s Regional Leaders have Taken the Potemkin Village Approach to New Heights Under Putin

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 7 – Under tsars and commissars, Russian officials have always tried to put their best foot forward whenever their regions were visited by the country’s leader; but under Vladimir Putin, regional leaders have taken this approach, known for its founder Prince Potemkin, to new heights.

    According to a survey of the most extreme forms of erecting a façade to hide reality and suggest that things are really better than they are, regional officials over the last 25 years have taken a variety of steps that would have brought a blush to Potemkin and other practitioners of this tactic.

    The New Tab portal (thenewtab.io/25-let-pokazuhi/)points to the following cases as being especially egregious:

•    Bringing in substitute residents in place of the real ones so that the latter would not be able to complain about what happened to their village during a flood (Barsukovskaya, 2002);

•    Cleaning the street along which Putin was to pass 15 time and removing all the cars usually parked along it (Kolpino, 2009);

•    Bringing in new equipment to a hospital Putin was to visit and then removing it as soon as he left (Ivanovo, 2010);

•    Painting weeds along a roadway to look like flowers (Nizhny Novgorod, 2012);

•    Painting the asphalt of the road on which Putin was to travel (Vladivostok, 2016);

•    Covered up buildings in poor repair along Putin’s route (Volgograd, 2016);

•    Covered puddles with parquet flooring to obscure how bad the roads were and are (Arkhangelsk, 2017);

•    Shut down factories polluting the skies for a few days before Putin arrived so the skies would be blue (Krasnoyarsk, 2017);

•    Painted only those parts of the buildings Putin could see from his route and covered up posters of opposition figures with commercial ads (Ulyanovsk, 2018);

•    Covered up with banners old buildings that hadn’t been repaired in time (Omsk, 2019); and

•    Mowed the grass when there was snow on the ground and brought in special snow removal equipment the city didn’t ever have to remove drifts (Tsivilsk, 2024).

    The portal didn’t say whether these actions impressed Putin or helped the careers of those who engaged in them.