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# In fairness, let us recall that the myth of the Potemkin villages became quite popular in the West from the very moment of Catherine II's legendary Tauridan journey, when a pamphlet on Potemkin-Tavrichesky appeared in Europe, in which…
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/radi-spravedlivosti-vspomnim-chto-mif-o-potemkinskikh-derevniakh-iznachalno-stal-dovolno-populiaren-na-zapade-bukvalno-posle-legendarnogo-tavricheskogo-voiazha-ekateriny-ii-kogda-v-evro/
- Published: 2020-09-23T07:10:07.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:42:14.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Monarchies, Observations, Mores, People

Other sources also report on the Potemkin villages, but the notorious villages of painted plywood did not lead Catherine astray: this was the ordinary practice of adorning a monarch's route, just as was the building of sumptuous wayside pavilions for the Russian empress's halts.

To begin with, let us recall that Catherine set off for Taurida through Belorussia in winter, in January 1787\. One of the aims was to inspect a new city, raised in record time, Ekaterinoslav, later Novorossiysk and, in Soviet years, Dnepropetrovsk, which was promised the status of a third capital. And only after Ekaterinoslav was a visit planned to the recently annexed Crimea.

The whole journey was of a far more sumptuous character than any of her earlier travels, whether the Kazan excursion "to the dacha" of 1767, made on 25 vessels down the Volga with a suite of two thousand, the voyage on Lake Ladoga in 1765, or the trip to Rostov and Yaroslavl in 1763\. The visit to Taurida cost the treasury more than ten million roubles and was prepared by Potemkin over three years; he entrusted the construction and improvement works along the entire road to governors appointed to answer for them. Surely nothing of the kind is done nowadays, is it?

Catherine travelled to Taurida in a whole train of 14 carriages and 164 sleighs. The autocrat rode in an eight-room carriage drawn by 30 horses. Along the entire route of the convoy, the imperial road was lit at dusk by enormous bonfires of felled trees on both sides. On the way to Kiev the most exalted train made 76 halts, and at each such station real palaces and galleries had been built, with abundant tables for rest and refreshment. Besides this, pleasure structures were erected along the road: various colonnades, arches, passageways, gates and even a little town called Aleshin, to which peasants were brought specially, to greet Catherine standing by the roadside in clean clothes, sometimes freezing to death.

By April the overland route gave way to the water route: down the Dnieper Catherine and her suite were conveyed by 80 vessels with 3,000 sailors, headed by seven enormous, gaily dressed galleys. On the banks the Cossacks staged spectacles. And, as before, decorations in the form of all manner of painted scenery went up along the way. In the town of Kaniv the travellers were greeted with a salvo of a hundred thousand rockets. In Kremenchug a parade of 45 cavalry squadrons awaited Catherine.

Of course, everything that was going on was understood in equal measure by the empress, by her courtiers, and by the foreign guests, ambassadors and aristocrats whom she wished to impress, just as we understand it from a cursory description of the voyage. And for that age, and all the more so for Russia, such scale and such an escort was commonplace practice. As for the Potemkin villages as such, it is hardly possible to imagine Catherine the Great as so foolish a woman as to suppose that the Baroque pavilions sprung up along her road amid the snows would have been there of their own accord. No, in her understanding this was a perfectly natural ritual on meeting her.