Statue of Yury Andropov

Northern European Russia


Unveiled to protests and arrests in 2005, a youthful statue of Yury Andropov commemorates the USSR’s 1982–84 supremo and chief of Petrozavodsk’s Komsomol (Communist Party youth wing) some 50 years earlier. Andropov was a long-term KGB director and some believe that had he not died, he would have implemented necessary reforms without breaking up the Soviet Union, unlike Gorbachev.