Prince Grigory Potemkin, whose remains were exhumed and taken away by the Russians before fleeing Cherson, seems to have become an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the occupiers.
Unsuccessful in the military reconquista of “New Russia” that Potemkin once ruled, his self-proclaimed heirs resorted to the less glorious but better-known part of the prince's legacy - the construction of bogus settlements along the voyage of Tsarina Catherine of the Great to Crimea in 1787. Houses painted on cardboard, placed at some distance from the road along which the tsarina's carriage drove, were intended to give the impression that Potemkin was successfully administering the newly founded region of the empire.
They were called Potemkin villages.
A classic Potemkin village was recently erected in the center of the ill-fated city of Mariupol, almost wiped from the face of the earth by Russian bombs.
The ruins of the theater there became a visible sign of Putin's war crimes.
Russian forces bombed the theater, where thousands, mostly women and children, had taken refuge on March 16, despite the words "Children" in giant letters on the asphalt outside.
300 to 600 people are said to have been killed and buried under the ruins.
For Putin, culture is just a pretext for war
Petersburg governor Alexander Beglov said in September that he would help rebuild the theatre.
For the time being, the renovation was limited to the construction of a scaffolding for a fabric wall as a privacy screen in front of the ruins.
A Potemkin village mainly manifests wishful thinking.
The front of the new stage design shows the intact facade of the theater.
In addition, the "Potyomkin Theater" is decorated with huge portraits of poets - on the left Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy, on the right Nikolai Gogol and Taras Shevchenko.
The latter two are intended to demonstrate the occupiers' tolerance of Ukrainian culture.
The idea of decorating the site of a mass murder with portraits of writers reflects degenerate thinking, consistent with Putin's propaganda.
Pushkin and Russian culture are an integral part of "military special operations" like Iran's Shahed drones.
During the Russian occupation, posters with Russian writers were everywhere in Kherson.
The screens of the Mariupol Theater are decorated with authors' heads and titles of their main works - Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin", Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Gogol's "Revisor".
Shevchenko is only honored with a portrait, Russian tolerance did not go so far as to name his works.
Underneath the portrait of Pushkin is written: "He is in a hurry to live and to feel", which is a verse by Pushkin's friend Pyotr Vyazemsky, which Pushkin put before "Eugene Onegin" as an epigraph.
However, the creators of the Potemkin Theater did not pay attention to such details.
Below Gogol is a quote from his "Revisor": "Alexander the Great was of course a hero, but that doesn't mean you have to smash chairs." The sentence sounds like a formula for Putin's short-sightedness to use the great Russian culture as a pretext for his war .