The General Façade

There is a story, largely apocryphal, that the Russian general Potemkin deceived Catherine the Great by instructing workers to build 'stage sets' of villages along the Dnieper river in the late 1780s.

These 'stage sets' were housefronts, storefronts, churchfronts, with nothing more substantial behind them than there is on any Hollywood backlot; locals were recruited to serve as 'extras', and were scrubbed and freshly clothed, and furnished with other trappings of prosperity, so that the Empress would be pleased with the condition of her people and the great things that her general [and minister] had wrought.

The original 'Potemkin villages' are now thought to be a pre-urban legend of sorts, but their counterparts certainly existed in the Soviet Union and Communist China - and even in New York City, where in the late 1980s anyone driving the Cross-Bronx Expressway could see artists' renditions of curtains and flowerpots bravely propped up in the blown-out windows of abandoned tenements.

Potemkin's Office is the organizational counterpart to the Cross-Bronx plywood paintings. It's any organization, sacred or secular, for-profit, non-profit, or official, in which appearance has become so much more important than reality that there is little or no reality remaining behind the façade ... or the reality behind the mask is very, very different from the painted illusion.