There is an old story that I think about a lot. The story is about Prince Potemkin, the irrepressible favourite of Catherine the Great, trying to win his empress back with a boat trip down the Dnieper River. The story goes that the aging Potemkin had been abroad for many months, conquering the Crimea and expanding the Russian empire, and now wanted to show off his success in the region. But, whilst he had been away, the world had changed. Catherine had become bored by his lengthy absences and taken a new favourite at court. This was Potemkin’s final chance to win her back. It took Catherine a while to reach him because the winter that year was harsh and icy, but eventually the ice melted and she was able to visit him in Kiev. This bought the desperate Potemkin some time to get things ready for her visit. Because, in his rush to impress her, Potemkin had created a much bigger problem. Many of his new settlements had not yet been built. These settlements would later become Sevastopol, Dnipro, Kherson, Odessa. Great, towering cities. Icons of the modern world. But in their current state, they did not look so impressive.
So, Potemkin decided to lie. He played a trick on the Empress that would echo through the ages. The prince hired thousands of peasants to build fake villages along the banks of the river. Hundreds of fake, wooden settlements. Catherine would sail past on her barge and see a never-ending line of tall towers, impressive houses, mansions and farmyards. She would imagine her new empire, vast and unassailable. Then, they would stop the boat. The Empress would fall asleep. And the structures would be dismantled and reassembled further down the route. In the morning, Catherine would awake and continue her journey down the river. She would see the same fake houses. The same facades appearing again and again, and the Empress would be none the wiser. Amazingly, the trick worked. The Empress was astounded by the sheer scale of his achievement. As soon as she returned to Moscow, Catherine issued a charter proclaiming his achievements in the south. Potemkin was her favourite once again.
It is an alluring story. I have often sat and wondered what the peasants thought as they packed up those wooden facades. Did they start at some point to enjoy the work? Did they learn to appreciate the charade, the skill of the lie? Did they too, deep down, hope that the Empress was impressed by their trickery? Or did they find it all so pointless, gruelling, unnecessary? Did they hate the deception and resent their role in it? I think the reason this story has always resonated with me is that I recognise a part of it. Our present society calls to mind a Potemkin village. The modern world is built on such myths: trickle down economics, white supremacy, limitless growth, the third way of postmodernity. Our national identity has been shaped by these stories, global capitalism relies on them. And, like the peasants employed by Potemkin, we know we are complicit in the lie. Still, we continue. For the money, for the easier life, for the approval of the prince. We work through the night, reassembling the forgery further down the route.
It may be an alluring story, but it is also almost certainly untrue. Potemkin was one of the most significant statesmen of his day. He really did conquer the Crimea. He built impressive cities, vast palaces, giant monuments. They were real, not fake. Potemkin established the Black Sea Fleet, still a major force in Russia today. In fact, much of modern day Ukraine has been shaped by Grigory Potemkin and – as the bombs fall on Kherson and Odessa – Putin is now trying to reconquer the same cities, following the same imperial path that Potemkin once forged. Potemkin was a wily political operator and, despite their occasional differences, the prince and the empress remained lifelong collaborators. They may have even been secretly married. Either way, Potemkin was immensely powerful. His rivals at court hated him for it, which is why they spread the rumours of fake villages along the Dnieper River. These rumours started before the trip. Departing for Kiev, Catherine was already being told by jealous courtiers that she would only see screens on her travels, not real villages. Gossips said that the south was full of pasteboard villages, that the ships and the guns were merely painted illusions, and that the cavalry were all horseless. It was widely believed that Prince Potemkin ruled over a painted land of cardboard cut-outs and cheap theatrics.
Potemkin did have a flare for the theatrical. He was known to have dressed up country homes to resemble more impressive palaces, which perhaps provided the inspiration for this most persistent rumour. And he clearly understood the value of these little performances. His boat trip down the Dnieper river was spectacular. Three giant boats were built by the English engineer Samuel Bentham, the brother of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham who is famous for having invented the panopticon. These boats each contained hundreds of rooms. They were powered by thousands of oarsmen and housed their own giant orchestras. Potemkin threw wild parties on his barge; he regaled guests with raucous stories and drank with them into the early hours. Contrary to the myths, he was more in favour with the queen than he had ever been; he did not need to worry about jealous suitors. Catherine and Potemkin used her trip as an exercise in diplomacy, cementing alliances with neighbouring royals and privately plotting their next move. They also ventured into the interior, visiting newly built palaces with beautiful, sprawling gardens designed by the English gardener William Gould. Potemkin was an Anglophile. At one such palace, Potemkin had laid on an elaborate feast. Diners ate in the sculpture gardens as hundreds of musicians played classical music and thousands of fireworks were set off around them. One diner called it, “one of those fairy palaces that arose as if by magic.”
It may have been easier for some contemporaries to believe in magic than think these spectacles actually happened. Potemkin was aware of the damaging rumours at the time and wrote to Catherine that, “the main thing is that this malacy and jealousy cannot harm me in your eyes.” Both Catherine and Potemkin liked to witness things for themselves. The empress saw for herself what Potemkin had built in the Crimea. She was incredibly proud of him. But the story of the fake villages was simply too good to disappear. And it is this story that has outlasted Grigory Potemkin and all his actual achievements. Whilst most people in the West have never heard of the man himself, Potemkin is now frequently invoked to describe political deception, the world of spin and lies that structures so much of modern day politics. The Potemkin village has become a go-to metaphor for lies and deceit. It has been used to describe the propaganda of the Soviet Union and the projected phantasia of Western capitalism. And yet it too is based on a lie. Lie after lie. Village after village. The iconic story of political spin was itself a dirty piece of political spin, spread by his enemies at court and abroad.
However, this was not to be Potemkin’s final brush with the tricksy world of propaganda. Several centuries after his death, a battleship in the Black Sea Fleet was named after him. Potemkin would now unwittingly play a central role in the Bolshevik revolution. In 1905, the crew of the Battleship Potemkin mutinied against their officers. When the sailors refused to eat borscht made with maggot-infested meat, the ship’s second in command threatened to shoot anyone defying his orders. Instead, the mutineers killed him along with several other officers and assumed control of the ship, sailing to Odessa under a red flag. It was an important precursor to the Russian revolution; Lenin called 1905 the “great dress rehearsal”, without which the October Revolution of 1917 would have been impossible. When the sailors arrived in Odessa, they displayed the body of a murdered comrade on the shore with a note that read: “This is the body of Vakulinchuk, killed by the commander for having told the truth.” This barbarous act inspired the citizens of Odessa to riot, an insurrection that was quickly repressed by another brutal massacre. Thousands were executed and the Battleship Potemkin eventually returned to service in the Russian navy. Its name, however, was changed to “Panteleimon”, after a physician saint who was sentenced to death for performing magic. Potemkin provoked too strong feelings.
But the dead prince and his eponymous ship were not out of fashion for long. Following the October Revolution, the Potemkinists were hailed as heroes and the Soviets commissioned the young Sergei Eisenstein to shoot a film honouring the failed revolutionaries. His film, Battleship Potemkin, is a masterpiece of Soviet filmmaking. Charlie Chaplin called it “the best film in the world”; Billy Wilder agreed. In 1958, a jury at the Brussels World’s Fair crowned it the “best film of all time”. It is indeed a startling film, famous in particular for its vivid montage sequence depicting a massacre on the Odessa steps. The film was later recut for distribution in Weimar Germany, editing out the most violent sequences so as to make it more palatable. When the Nazis came to power, officers were banned from watching the film but the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels watched it and was impressed. “Anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film,” he said. Battleship Potemkin was later banned by many Western governments; it was banned for a longer period of time than any other film in British history. Although the massacre had never taken place on the Odessa steps at all, the sequence sears itself into the mind of every viewer. Indeed, the sequence became so iconic that the steps are now officially known as the Potemkin Stairs. But the Potemkin Stairs are currently closed to visitors by a string of barbed wire. A Ukrainian military checkpoint has been established at the top and at the bottom of the steps. Unexplained security reasons, a result of the ongoing war with Russia.
Despite its success, Eisenstein was not happy with his life after Battleship Potemkin. His more experimental style had initially suited the Soviet film authorities who were trying to move away from more traditional narrative techniques and model a form of ensemble storytelling. But when Boris Shumyatsky became the chairman of the Soviet film organisation, social realism became the dominant style and the use of montage was deemed inaccessible and elitist. Shumyatsky publicly denounced Eisenstein. He even had supporters of Eisenstein executed and told Stalin that Eisenstein should never be allowed to make another film. Eisenstein escaped to Hollywood – which he found to be as vapid and mediocre – and waited for his fortunes to change. He was lucky. One day, Shumyatsky and his wife were invited to have dinner with Stalin. Guests were required to drink a toast to Stalin's health, but Shumyatsky was teetotal and only took a small sip. He was executed a few weeks later. Eisenstein returned to Russia and was finally allowed to make films again, but his nerves never really recovered. His subsequent films were awarded the Stalin Prize and the Order of Lenin, but he was anxious, depressed, disillusioned. In a letter to French film critic Leon Moussinac, he once wrote: “We aren’t rebels anymore. We’re becoming lazy priests. I have the impression that the enormous breath of 1917 which gave birth to our cinema is blowing itself out.” Like Eisensten, Potemkin was eventually swallowed by his own propaganda. The most captivating stories degenerate into blunt culture wars. Dum stories told by lazy priests.
Potemkin has always been a contentious figure in Russia and Ukraine, and his legacy is now the subject of fierce disagreement. Violence stalks him. In 2022, Russian soldiers stole the remains of Potemkin from a cathedral in Ukraine, supposedly in order to “protect him”. And so Potemkin has been taken on another journey, this time to some unknown location under military escort. Russian soldiers recently stole a statue of Potemkin from the occupied city of Kherson, and Ukrainians have taken down a statue to him in Mykolaiv. He has become a part of the war, a symbol of Russian supremacy, and a figure personally admired by Vladimir Putin. As the war in Ukraine deepens and becomes ever more desperate, the founding stories of these great cities are being reappraised. Potemkin is once again persona non grata. But it is not the first time his remains have been tampered with – and it will certainly not be the last. Emperor Paul of Russia once ordered the bones of Potemkin to be dug up and disposed of, but the soldiers disobeyed him and buried Potemkin deeper underground. In the nineteenth century, his grave was dug up multiple times by inquisitive pilgrims and, during the 1918 revolution, peasants dug up his bones again. The bones of Potemkin have been dug up and reburied at least nine times over the centuries. At this point, it is impossible to know for certain whether it is even his bones. And nor does it particularly matter. Potemkin is a symbol, not a man. A political fairytale.
So, why does this matter today? Confronted by a capitalist system that is responsible for such terrible suffering and yet hides behind a gross and absurd mythos, how should we respond? There are some who believe that merely revealing the lies should be enough. Sunlight is the best disinfectant! If only people understood that the villages are just wooden facades, it would all be so simple! But politics and storytelling have a more complex relationship. The Potemkin story is often told as a fable. In this version of the story, it is usually assumed that we - the audience - play the role of Catherine, blindly accepting fakery as truth. But, more often than not, we play the role of the villagers. We understand the lie we tell, and we tell it anyway. We feel compelled to. We are living through an age of bad propaganda made by lazy priests. But simply pointing out the lie is not enough, we also have to stop participating in it. Leave the prince to play his own dirty tricks.
Putin has learnt more from the Potemkin story than military history alone; he understands the importance of propaganda, and the effect it has on a post-truth age. The facades he assembles are so clearly fake. Indeed, that is often the point. Peter Pomerantsev, in his book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, argues that Putin has transformed modern day Russia into a bewildering piece of experimental theatre in which nobody knows what is real and what is fake. The idea was famously taken up by Adam Curtis in his documentary Hypernormalisation. Pomerantsev points to the work of Vladislav Surkov, who had a background in avant-garde theatre and public relations before becoming a key adviser to Putin. In the LRB, he put it like this: “The country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away.” Pomerantsev describes a ceaselessly shape-shifting political culture that is unstoppable because it's indefinable. “This is the world Surkov has created, a world of masks and poses, colourful but empty, with little at its core but power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth.” One startling example of this is that Surkov funded opposition groups in Russia that attacked both him and the government. But, crucially, he also told people that this is what he was doing. He made them aware of the lie. This strategy of political storytelling - of propaganda that proudly announces itself as such, or makes no effort to pretend otherwise - is also deployed by Western capitalists. This is what gets liberals so incensed about Brexit or Trump, political victories secured by lies that everyone - even the people being lied to - knew were lies and chose to go along with anyway. But it is also evident in the mainstream of British politics. Nobody believes anything politicians say anymore. There are no intellectuals who credibly make the case for fossil capitalism. And yet we stumble on, repeating the same mistakes. Reassembling the facade further down the route.
Vladislav Surkov now writes poetry and fiction under a pseudonym. But, true to form, he has already told everyone his secret. Surkov even wrote the introduction to his pseudonymous novel under his real name, calling the author a terrible hack one moment and then proclaiming it the best book he has ever read the next. The novel, Almost Zero, tells the story of a public relations man managing the reputation of a regional governor. It flirts with autobiography, paying a game with the reader of fact and fiction. Journalists are threatened, environmental crimes are covered up, fights break out amongst rival publishing houses. Reading Almost Zero, it is impossible to know whether this is all just another one of Surkov’s tricks. Perhaps it really is a damning satire of Putin’s Russia. Perhaps it is another strange performance. For his part, Pomerantsev has described the book as “exactly the sort of book Surkov's youth groups burn on Red Square.” I found it quite remarkable. At one point in the novel, the protagonist of Almost Zero finds himself returning to his home village and finding it, strangely, to be half the size that he remembered it. But he is not anxious or shocked: “he felt, in a twisted way, quite clean, merry, and fresh.” A character named Red informs him that the village was sold to a film company who wanted to burn it down for a movie. “So our village became a production prop”, he tells his friend. Red rebuilds the village, but only half the size because it is cheaper that way. Is this prop village a good enough trick to be believed? It’s not even trying. It exists merely to provoke a few nostalgic thoughts. As for Surkov, he has since been dismissed as an adviser to Putin. In 2022, he was reportedly under house arrest. The historian Mark Galeotti summarises his career thus: “He was the front man, the circus barker who could promise the greatest show on Earth, but not himself deliver it. Alone, he was all Potemkin, no battleships.” A prop village. Half the size of what it used to be.
A kind of hope, I think.
A final thought.
When I was at school, I wrote a play called Potemkin’s People. I think I probably stumbled upon the story of Potemkin a couple of years earlier and have been obsessed with it ever since. I know, I know. What a strange little boy! But I am who I am. The play is about a political prisoner who tells her captors a story. The story she tells is about a group of people who colonise a new planet after their original home is destroyed by avarice and violence. This new planet is full of tricks and deception. It is a chance for them to start afresh, but – just as they are beginning to understand the rules of this strange new world – the colonists spy another settlement in the distance. They convince themselves that they need to compete with it: build taller towers, construct higher walls, invest in bigger weapons. And everything they do, their neighbours do too. They become consumed by the competition, driven only by fear and greed. Until one day, a child climbs over the wall and runs towards the rival village. She does not make it. Instead, she runs headfirst into a giant mirror. The settlers have been competing with themselves the entire time, terrified of their own reflection. Another strange illusion. In the story, the settlers learn from this and take the opportunity to change their ways. But the play ends on a less optimistic note. The prison guards tell the prisoner that they know society is nothing more than a funhouse mirror, a Potemkin village, but they are prepared to go along with it anyway.
I recently found out that one of the final things Potemkin did before his death is to throw a huge party in the Tauride Palace. It was another fantastic spectacle. William Gould, his favourite gardener, had created a garden of exotic plants and diamonds hidden amongst the trees. The winter garden – the biggest in Europe – also contained a giant glass hall. And the walls there were all covered in mirrors! The incredible number of mirrors gave the impression that the garden was endless, stretching on throughout the palace forever and ever. Sanded paths, follies and hills, glass fruits and golden statues, as far as the eye could see. On the western wall of another hall, Potemkin commissioned an artwork that resembled a passageway. Columns and corridors were painted so skillfully that the guests did not notice the wall in front of them and - rather drunk - ran into it headfirst. A wall that was not a wall. A passageway that was not a passageway. When I read about this final party, I wondered whether I had read it years ago and forgotten about it. Perhaps the mirror in my play was inspired by this story. But I do not remember it, if so. I suspect a better explanation is that the prince was a trickster, even if his most famous trick never actually happened. And some tricks are easier to predict than we think.
Thanks for reading. Much love to everyone resisting the fossil fuel economy whoever and wherever you are.