Potemkinn.

1904 H. W. Fischer Private Lives William II & Consort x. 189 And those Potemkin villages!.. The Herr Graf..compels his peasants to whitewash and paint farmhouse and hovel for miles around.

1918 W. L. MacPherson tr. W. Mühlon Vandal of Europe 125 Let distress and defeats come, and the Potemkin village of national unity will be blown away, despite the props of military law.

1938 G. Soloveytchik Potemkin xiv. 283 Potemkin's detractors have asserted that he built whole sham villages, with cardboard houses and paste palaces..in order to create a false picture of progress and prosperity... The originator of these stories..was the Saxon diplomat Helbig, and the legend of ‘Potemkin Villages’..as a synonym of sham owes its inception to him.

1974 Guardian 21 Mar. 3/8 It is good diplomacy..to pretend that the EEC is a political entity... But don't expect serious decisions from a political Potemkin village.

2005 Times Union (Albany, New York) (Nexis) 10 July a1 After his visit, he wrote a letter charging the center with running a Potemkin village, which looks fine on the surface but has serious underlying problems.

1938 J.-A. Goris Strangers should not Whisper vii. 241 According to all Americans who, however prejudiced, visited the Congo—not on a Potemkin tour, but freely, and excursioning at random—the work the Belgians have done deserves unmitigated and high praise.

1982 T. Berger Reinhart's Women x. 155 They were so uniform and lifeless in gold-stamped leather that for a moment he took them for a Potemkin collection, an unbroken facade of book-spines only, cemented to a solid board in front of no texts.

1991 in B. MacArthur Despatches from Gulf War 119 Theresienstadt..was ‘a Potemkin camp’, used for propaganda, including films, and for that reason conditions in it, though harsh, were much better than in most of the other cities of hell.