Potemkin village

A Potemkin village (Russian: ) is a construction, literal or figurative, that provides a façade to a situation, to make people believe that the situation is better than it actually is.

The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built by Grigory Potemkin, a field marshal and former lover of Catherine the Great, to impress the Empress during her visit 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 Dnieper River in order to impress the Russian Empress and foreign guests. The structures would be disassembled after she passed, and re-assembled farther along her route to be seen again.