Potemkin

views updated May 14 2018

Potemkin transliteration of the name of Grigori Aleksandrovich Potyomkin, a favourite of Empress Catherine II of Russia, who reputedly gave the order for sham villages to be built for the empress's tour of the Crimea in 1787.

Potemkin was the name of a battleship whose crew mutinied in the Russian Revolution of 1905 when in the Black Sea, bombarding Odessa before seeking asylum in Romania. The incident, commemorated in Eisenstein's 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin, persuaded the tsar to agree to a measure of reform.

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