The strange case of Vladimir Putin and the disappearing lawn

When Vladimir Putin announced he was visiting Pskov last month, the Russian city spared no expense installing new bins, freshly painting lamp posts and laying new lawns.



But a video filmed by a local resident shows that the freshly laid turf was removed when the prime minister left, leaving only bare mud behind. The turf has now been dubbed the 'Potemkin lawn', suggesting that it might have been "an exclusive lawn from Moscow that travels the country in Putin's baggage".

The Potemkin lawn is a play on the Russian trend of 'Potemkin villages', named after the 18th Century general Prince Grigory Potemkin, who is said to have had whole villages built to impress Catherine the Great when she visited the newly conquered Crimea in 1787.


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The name has stuck as shorthand for any effort by local authorities to give a misleadingly positive impression to visiting dignitaries.