How Russians again disappointed the West

Before Russia voted, Western pundits called the election a key test.

After predictions failed, they dismissed the result as illegitimate.

The legislative elections in Russia have become a major topic in global media.

The Times even published an editorial with the impressive headline ‘Potemkin election’.

Apparently, the author is unaware of the fact that his apparent witticism is out of place.

He must also be ignorant of the origins of the term ‘Potemkin village’.

Had he done some research, he would have known that Field Marshal Potemkin did not show Catherine the Great and many foreign ‘observers’ (as the people who accompanied her would be called today) fake villages.

He showed them cities he had founded – Yekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk), Kherson, and Sevastopol – as well as the powerful Black Sea Fleet that had sprung up seemingly out of nowhere and astonished Austrian Emperor Joseph II, who was part of the Empress’s entourage.

If the authors of The Times believe these ‘Potemkin villages’ never existed, they should have a look at the modern map of Novorossiya and Crimea.

In terms of significance, the current State Duma elections may be compared to Catherine the Great’s journey to southern Russia.

That trip demonstrated to the entire world that the map of Europe had fundamentally changed and that the once-wild steppes had become an integral part of the Russian Empire.

It was precisely for this reason that back then, the purveyors of fake news rushed to concoct tales about ‘Potemkin villages’ – just as today, they try to slander the elections held in Russia’s historic territories , in the very cities founded by Potemkin nearly 250 years ago.

I’d like to note how dramatically the perception of the elections has shifted in Western media over a short period of time.

Just a week and a half ago, The Sunday Times published an extensive ‘analytical’ piece on why the elections were important.