The Library › Reel IV · All the Empress’s Men
Were the “Potemkin villages” really fake?
VERDICTRUMOR
The story of painted, portable villages along the Dnieper on Catherine’s 1787 tour comes from Georg von Helbig, a Saxon diplomat who was not on the journey and repeated Petersburg gossip in his book on Potemkin. Foreign observers on the trip admitted the fortresses, ships and settlements were real. Potemkin’s biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore calls the phrase an invention of his enemies.
The receipts
- An Affair to Remember (review of Love and Conquest), The New York Review of Books
- Potemkin Villages, Lapham’s Quarterly
The comedy version
The untold story of Catherine the Great, inventor of the job interview.
Play All the Empress’s Men ☞More from this shelf
- Did Catherine the Great die having sex with a horse?Invented
- Did Catherine the Great seize the throne in a borrowed military uniform?True
- Did Peter III really court-martial and hang a rat?True
- Did Catherine’s husband play with toy soldiers in bed?True
- Did Catherine the Great have her husband Peter III killed?Disputed
- Did Catherine the Great buy Voltaire’s library?True