A few months ago, while looking for something else, my partner came across a set of postcards I bought in the Soviet Union in 1988. They’ve been sitting on my desk ever since, waiting to be scanned, uploaded, and explained. I bought them on the penultimate day of my trip, when I made a solo journey out to VDNKh, or the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy (ВДНХ, Выставка Достижений Народного Хозяйства), in the northern suburbs of Moscow. At the time, VDNKh was a massive exhibition grounds dedicated to celebrating the technological and economic of accomplishments of the Soviet government and states. Anyone who has been to a World Expo would have no difficult recognizing the purpose and organization of the grounds—dramatic vistas, state pavilions subsumed into a national narrative, folk music and costumes at every corner, heavy emphasis progress in science and technology. It would’ve been a nice lesson in state propaganda had I not already been immersed in it for weeks. I spent my afternoon in the Cosmos Pavilion (except when I was outside listening to music and eating bubliki, which for some reason weren’t available in Leningrad). I was practically pulsating with energy, a far cry from my usual state of melancholy that summer. It was my first opportunity to see real spacecraft and I was going to do it even if it meant navigating the Metro solo. That the spacecraft happened to be Soviet didn’t matter at all to me. At least, I don’t remember sorting out the exhibits in the Space Pavilion in terms of US vs. USSR, Us vs. Them. I was just excited to see real satellites and a bit awed by their size. A few of the postcards and their captions (click on the images for a larger view):