Hey, Yuri!

When we visited Expo '86, I was fascinated by the Soviet pavilion. Like the US pavilion, it focussed on the nation's achievements in space travel, and of course Yuri Gagarin played a huge role in that pursuit as the first human being to reach outer space. This massive statue greeted visitors to the pavilion, and inside there was a full-scale Soyuz capsule. I was agog.

No one imagined that just a couple of years later the Soviet Union would collapse, ending history. Or so the theory goes...