ご指名質問 #19 Potemkin villages

BBCの記事です。NNkoreaの（最近のマスコミの省略の仕方）お隣に住んでいるものとしては今さらという内容ですが，英国というfar westからの記者には，彼の国はinscrutableだらけなのでしょう。文中の太字はどういう意味なのでしょうか。その由来は？今日は反応があまりないP柿生君いかがでしゃうか。丑三つ時前までに。（UG）
North Korea - the most bizarre country in the world
By Sue Lloyd-Roberts
BBC News, North Korea
Imagine a country where your mobile phone is taken from you at the airport with no explanation or apology, where there's no access to the internet, where your minders watch every move and you're reported if you try to leave your hotel alone.
A country which has not been at war for half a century but has one of the largest standing armies in the world and where people are expected to worship a president who died 16 years ago.
No, I am not describing Big Brother and the country of Airstrip One in George Orwell's 1984 - it's the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 2010.
I went to the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev years and have filmed in Burma and Tibet, but I have never before been anywhere I have been so watched and controlled, or where everything is so stage-managed.
Potemkin villages sprang up wherever I went. I visited model farms, model villages, model factories and model schools, though, at the school, even my government minders looked faintly embarrassed when I asked a model pupil in an English language class who he admired most among modern world leaders and he answered: "Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong."
（続きは以下のサイトで）
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8711355.stm