Tourism, Memory Production and Contested Ethnic Hierarchies in Post-Soviet Almaty

Abstract Memory politics in post-Soviet cities is a growing area of research with significant political implications. However, there is still relatively little consideration of memory production in the sphere of tourism, particularly when it comes to the analysis of memory practices beyond official city branding. Focusing on the case of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s former capital, this article puts forward a multi-actor analysis of memory-making in city branding, highlighting the frictions between the identity projects promoted by city authorities and private entrepreneurs. We show how tourism has become an important battlefield for the negotiation of ethnic hierarchies in the city.

associated with communist rules have been displaced and new national symbols and heritage have been created to fit a nationalising agenda. This is also true for Kazakhstan (Diener 2002;Tiberghien & Lennon 2019), where the nation-building process has been characterised by two contradictory phenomena: on the one hand, a civic nationalism discourse on the official level that promotes equal rights for all citizens regardless of their ethnicity, and the promotion of ethnic Kazakhs as a core ethnic group of the nation on the other (Laruelle 2016;Sharipova et al. 2017). The literature on nation-building in Kazakhstan has emphasised how the official discourse of multiculturalism-of Kazakhstan as a multi-ethnic state-plays a special role in limiting the political claims of Russians in Kazakhstan, by creating 'fake arenas' for the representation of their rights (Danzer 2009;Davenel 2012;Dunaev et al. 2019). While the multi-ethnic character of the state is regularly emphasised in official speeches and media representations, there are several important examples showing an emphasis on ethnic Kazakhs as a core ethnicity. The 1997 relocation of the capital from multi-ethnic Almaty to the steppe and the construction of Astana (now Nur-Sultan) as the new capital of Kazakhstan (Schatz 2004;Bissenova 2014;Shelekpayev 2019) accentuated the role of Kazakhs as the state-forming nation. While Astana also represents Kazakhstani multiculturalism due to mass migration of ethnic Kazakhs to the traditionally Russian north (Savin & Alekseenko 1998), the city's memory landscape has undergone a significant but not total de-Sovietisation and been filled with monuments that refer instead to the archetypes of Kazakh traditional culture (Bekus & Medeuova 2017, p. 17). More recently, memory politics has focused on the long history of the Kazakh nation. Soviet and imperial pasts as well as histories of earlier nationhood compete for the imagination of the Kazakh national community (Norris 2012;Medeuova et al. 2016;Bekus 2017;Nowicka 2019). The position of Kazakhstan's Russian minority, who claim a distinct social role based on their numbers (18.4% of the overall population) as well as their historical importance in the development of Kazakhstan as a state (Peyrouse 2007(Peyrouse , 2008Danzer 2009), has, indirectly at least, become an object of contestation within these debates.
This article provides a critical analysis of memory politics in multi-ethnic Almaty, discussing competing constructions of identity in the tourism industry. We examine how different actors, namely the city administration and private tour organisations, invest the city with conflicting images and identities, based on the selective remembering of particular pasts and the forgetting of others. We show how these actors use historical memory to participate in the ongoing struggle over the imagination of Kazakh identity and the ethnic hierarchy in Kazakhstani society.
Analysing the memory narratives embedded in different place-branding projects, the article makes two contributions to the existing literature. Firstly, it addresses the literature on urban identities and nation-building in Kazakhstan by focusing on the largely overlooked city of Almaty. Despite the vast literature on symbolic politics and the reshaping of national identities in Kazakhstan, the transformation of historical memory and heritage in Kazakhstan's former capital has been given little consideration. 1 This is particularly surprising, given the scholarly interest in the status of Kazakhstan's Russian minority. Ethnic Russians currently constitute a quarter of Almaty's population, making Almaty the most multi-ethnic city in Kazakhstan. Almaty has also traditionally been seen as a city developed under Russian imperial rule. We show that a close consideration of city branding processes in Almaty helps to better understand not only the status of Russians within Kazakhstan's symbolic politics but also the dynamics between the current official memory politics and bottom-up reactions to it, the latter being often omitted from analysis.
Secondly, the article makes a general contribution to the literature on memory and placemaking by revealing the multiple ways in which place-branding occur and the tensions inherent in this process. Such tensions can be seen as a characteristic of place-making projects, and one that acquires added weight within Kazakhstan's postcolonial setting. Tourism promotion is often conceived by stakeholders as apolitical, based on existing material landscapes and driven by business interests to market them in the best possible way. In line with the tradition of critical analysis in tourism studies (Aitchison et al. 2000;Ateljevic et al. 2007;Kanemasu 2013) and critical literature on place-branding (Aronczyk 2009;Kaneva 2011), we identify different city images promoted by the official city administration and private tour companies and examine their selective nature and political effects. We reveal how place-branding is used by different tourism actors as a way to negotiate ethnic hierarchies and imaginations of belonging in a nationalising state and to redefine the status of the former colonisers. The struggle over the production of historical memories is therefore not only played out within struggles over monuments or political debates, areas that have received the most attention from memory scholars, but also in the sphere of tourism where multiple actors communicate competing identities to external audiences.
The article is based on two months of focused ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Almaty as part of a study on memory-making in Russian tourism in post-Soviet cities. During the fieldwork period in July and August 2019, extensive participant observations of 11 guided tours were conducted alongside qualitative interviews with 12 tourism stakeholders, including managers and guides working for different tour companies in Almaty. Research participants were selected on the basis of their professional activities (they all were currently active in offering guided tours) as well as theoretical sampling, ensuring that participants involved a range of age groups (born and raised during the 1950s and 1960s, the late Soviet period (1970s-1980s) and after the collapse of the USSR), different ethnic backgrounds (ethnic Kazakhs and tour guides with a Slavic ethnic background) and experience of guiding city tours (ranging from six months to 40 years). In several cases, interviews were conducted with the tour guides who were observed during their guided tours. Additional interviews were taken with guides of tours we did not have an opportunity to observe. All interviews were conducted in Russian by a native speaker, one of the authors of this article. Most of the observed guided tours were conducted in Russian, while one guided tour was conducted in English for an international group of tourists.
The tours for participant observation were selected on the basis of their title and short description both on social networking sites and brochures displayed in specialist tour agencies in the city. The key criteria for selection was its relevance to the representation of city heritage. The tours were recorded in some cases on a dictaphone, in other cases using an app on a smartphone and GPS-tracked; observations on the guiding style, key themes and questions by and interactions with tourists were additionally captured in fieldnotes. Interviews and participant observations were analysed based on thematic analysis using NVivo software (Ritchie et al. 2003, pp. 220-57). Although it is never possible for social researchers to be completely free of partisanship towards certain social groups (Lumsden 2013), the risk of research biases was mitigated by the process of co-authorship by authors with two different citizenships and ethnicities-one Tatar with Russian citizenship and one Austrian-both based in the United Kingdom. Apart from our different backgrounds, different levels of engagement (one conducted the fieldwork) also led to extensive discussions and facilitated a nuanced interpretation of the data.
Autocratic contexts call for additional concern for research participants' safety and research ethics, especially when examining minority issues in nationalising contexts (Yusupova 2019), therefore in the article research participants and most tour companies have been anonymised. Moreover, while place-branding in Kazakhstan might not appear a sensitive topic, we agree with Eleanor Knott that social researchers should be aware of possible ethical obligations towards research participants that may emerge in politically dynamic contexts after the researchers have left the field (Knott 2019).
Alongside the ethnographic data, a qualitative content analysis of official print and online documents aimed at representing the city to tourists was conducted. The sampling was based on documents available at official tourist information centres in Almaty, Instagram accounts, the websites of companies providing city tours and online media articles related to tourism in Almaty dated between 2016 and 2019 as the period of most dramatic change in the memory politics of Kazakhstan.
Memory and place-branding: a critical approach While branding has been traditionally focused on commercial products and services, its principles have been extended to other areas of communication, including the branding of cities and nations and the use of promotional techniques to position them on a global market. Places are increasingly being promoted as 'trademarks' in branding campaigns, competing with other places to attract diverse international publics including investors, tourists and migrants, who can bring their economic, social and symbolic capital to a place (Morgan et al. 2002;Stigel & Frimann 2006;Aronczyk 2009). Place-branding broadly understood involves 'creating, sustaining, and shaping a favourable place identity' (Boisen et al. 2018, p. 5) that is communicated to external audiences. Memory plays a crucial role in place-branding; a place's history and cultural heritage are appropriated to highlight the specificity and uniqueness of places (Rivera 2008;Light 2015).
This article adopts a critical approach to the production of memory in place-branding, emphasising its constructive and political character as well as its plurality and inherent tensions. It does so by adopting a multi-actor approach that is not limited to the work of governments and branding agencies but incorporates other actors involved in the construction of a city image.
The marketing literature has traditionally conceived of place-branding as a neutral or postpolitical marketing strategy, drawing on already existing identities and fragments of culture, history and geography that are then picked up by branding agencies and other actors and communicated to an external audience. As Aronczyk argues in relation to nation-branding: national identity appears as a prepolitical, given force, neutral until taken up by nation-branding consultants, subjected to evaluation, and mobilized for the cause at hand. And if national identity is constituted in this paradigm as prepolitical, the work of nation-branding is presented as postpolitical-where the nation remains necessary not as a democratic resource for active participation or equal recognition, nor as a geopolitical force to mediate international conflict, but as an ensemble of non-threatening fragments of culture, history, and geography determined by committee. (Aronczyk 2009, p. 294) In city marketing, identity constructions are often considered as apolitical, overlooking the necessary selectivity and creative work involved in assembling fragments of memories and culture into a coherent narrative (Aronczyk 2009;Keightley & Pickering 2012;Varga 2013). The memory studies literature has emphasised the performative character of acts of remembering, showing that memory is something that does not just reflect existing social groups. Memory is seen as constitutive of communities and can be mobilised with different political effects (de Cesari 2017; Rigney 2018; Pfoser 2020). Memory-making in that sense is a bordering practice (de Cesari 2017, p. 18) that produces particular sociospatial imaginaries. It is used not only to include and exclude but also, as we will show, to construct hierarchies of belonging based on ideas about autochthony and rootedness.
Examining the politics of place-branding and remembering also involves paying attention to the tensions inherent to place-branding efforts. Within the marketing literature, placebranding has been conceived as a holistic concept (Boisen et al. 2018, p. 7), a process that is not just orchestrated by those promoting a place but also by other actors and processes such as word of mouth and media representations. For place-branding to work, images and ideas attached to a place should be coherent and coordinated, 'contribut(ing) to the expression of the same values and reinforce the same narratives' (Boisen et al. 2018, p. 7). 2 However, coherence is extremely difficult to achieve, leading to 'truisms and watered-down generalities' (Stigel & Frimann 2006, p. 264); also, it does not reflect the complexity of cities (in contrast to products and services whose identity is easier to construct) and does not take into account the actual diversity of what a destination offers, making it possible to project different city images to different tourist groups in a targeted way.
A consideration of incoherence and tensions is particularly important in the former Soviet space. The region has experienced extreme political, economic and social change since 1991 with the creation of new successor states to the Soviet Union and the rebranding of both nations and cities to create a new image and legitimise a new social order (Young & Light 2001;Kaneva 2011;Saunders 2016). Oushakine emphasises the productivity of looking at memory-making in post-Soviet spaces through a postcolonial lens (Oushakine 2011). He argues that, despite differences in their experiences of domination, the 'postcolonies of communism' face similar questions to other postcolonial states regarding how to represent the colonial past (Oushakine 2018, p. 64). Postcolonial studies of tourism show how new governments as well as service providers can use the sphere of tourism to assert cultural identities on their own terms (Amoamo 2007;Kanemasu 2013). In his analysis of the legitimisation of new ethnic hierarchies, Horowitz shows that, alongside the new identity projects of the postcolonial states, former colonisers also seek new legitimisation of their special status, which is usually achieved through advancing particular historical discourses, such as an emphasis of their special mission in the area, their experience of administering the territory or their autochthonous relationship to the area (Horowitz 1985, pp. 202-9).
We use these insights for a close analysis of how memories are mobilised and silenced in Almaty's city tourism, focusing not only on the official city administration but also other actors such as private entrepreneurs who offer their services to visitors and locals alike. While the literature on the post-Soviet space has tended to emphasise either official identity projects and rebranding efforts (Young & Light 2001;Diener & Hagen 2013, pp. 497-501;Pawłusz & Polese 2017) or tensions between local place-making projects and external (Western) representations and visitor expectations (Light 2000;Puczko et al. 2007;Saunders 2016), it is important to examine such internal struggles over the city image. Tourism provides different actors an opportunity to engage in the struggle over new cultural identities and ethnic hierarchies within a postcolonial constellation. Alongside official branding efforts, private entrepreneurs can use their services to communicate and to seek affirmation for their preferred version of the city's identity. The following section examines these place-branding projects in more detail, focusing first on the top-down efforts launched by the city authorities before introducing the work of different tour guiding companies.

Almaty city branding: a top-down perspective
In the first few years after losing its status of capital to Astana in 1997, Almaty adopted a new identity, namely that of the cultural and financial centre of Kazakhstan. More recently, city officials have been developing a city brand. In 2016, for the purpose of promoting tourism, Almaty adopted a city logo, described in the local media as 'taking into account modern trends while preserving cultural and historical traditions' (Kotenev 2016). The following symbolic meaning is inscribed in this logo by the city authorities: The logo resembles the structure of an atom-an indivisible particle. The apple in the centre is the core; the seven circles around it are the seven orbits of energy embedded in the core. In Kazakh culture, the number seven has a sacred meaning. Kazakhs honour Jeti Ata [a flower with seven petals] as a connection with their family, paying tribute to the past, the traditions of the people and personifying aspiration for a brighter future. The principal colour of the logo is based on traditional Kazakh patterns. These are the colours of the sky, the flag of Kazakhstan, the sun, freedom, vitality and energy, harmony with nature, inspiration and the purity of the creative path. (Kotenev 2016) Thus, nation-building at the national level highlighting Kazakh ethnic heritage is replicated at the local level. Several business initiatives in the tourism sector have picked up on this ethnicised city brand and gained financial support from city authorities for developing projects adopting this new vision. The next section will discuss these initiatives in greater detail.
The 'Kazakhisation' of the city is still at the planning stage rather than being a visible and clear part of city identity. One of the difficulties in developing this particular trajectory of city branding is Almaty's well-established identity as an imperial Russian settlement and a multinational Soviet capital and a relative lack of Kazakh ethnic narratives. Thus, citybranding has focused less on history than on Almaty as a destination for sport and recreational tourism. In 2018, government investment in Almaty's tourism industry rose 28% in comparison to the previous year (77.2 billion tenge, equivalent to US$200 million). Most of this money went to building roads to recreational areas and developing cycle paths and ski trails in the mountains that surround the city. 3 According to an interview with an official from the city tourism department, 4 local authorities are also interested in hosting large-scale events like international trade shows and creating the infrastructure for such events to attract more business tourists both from Russia and China, although Nur-Sultan, as the country's capital city, presents significant competition (Wolfel 2002).
An analysis of the official city tourism website 'Visit Almaty' shows the focus on sports as well as the marketing of natural recreational areas surrounding Almaty. 5 The attraction list on the main page consists mostly of sport and recreation sites, with no mention of heritage or cultural sites. Even in the list labelled 'culture', the first three places displayed on the webpage are recreational zones close to the city: the Medeo skating rink, Shymbulak ski resort and Mt Kok Tobe. The next attractions listed are the Central Mosque, the Museum of Kazakh Folk Musical Instruments, the Ascension Cathedral, the Independence Monument, the Arbat pedestrian zone, the First President's Park, several museums and theatres, and the opera house. The same representation of city attractions can be found in the print brochure distributed in city-run tourist information offices: Almaty is represented as a city surrounded by natural recreational areas but with few significant historical sites. References to tsarist and Soviet times are absent or downplayed in the descriptions of these places on the website and in the brochure.
The description of Medeo skating rink, which was built and gained international fame during the Soviet period, contains no mention of this Soviet legacy. Most other cultural attractions are also described without reference to their historical context. However, there are some exceptions, including the city's main memory site-Panfilov Park, named after the 28 Panfilov Guardsmen (see Figure 1). The first paragraph states: The park is named in honour of the Panfilov division, 28 hero soldiers who single-handedly stopped the advance of the fascist tanks on Moscow during the Second World War. The words of Vasily Klochkov, the permanent political commander of the division: 'Russia is great, but there is nowhere to retreat. Moscow is behind us!' are inscribed in every Soviet history textbook and still touch hearts. 6 The implication of the following framing is that the name of the park will eventually change, in accordance with the city's dynamic memory politics: The park was founded in the 1870s on the grounds of the old cemetery, which was part of the cathedral grounds and called the 'City Garden'. In the first half of the twentieth century, the park became continuity of generations, the patriotic education of the younger generation, the development of local production … Qazaq-Oner is a training, manufacturing, shopping, cultural, historical and entertainment centre located in the Visit Almaty tourist centre, where workshops are held by artisans on felting, pottery, jewellery, patchwork, batik, embroidery, weaving. 8 The creation of such a place in Almaty confirms the plans of the city officials to ethnicise city heritage by promoting Kazakh ethnicity as a commodity. A representative of the Almaty Tourism Department explained the plans to develop ethno-tourism based on 'our history, our identity, culture'. He said that the department supports various private projects and is in the process of building an ethno-city dedicated to traditional Kazakh culture. 9 However, at the time of the fieldwork in July and August 2019, the promotion of ethnic heritage was a recent activity by city officials and still awaited materialisation in the urban landscape; craft workshops or other activities linked to Kazakh heritage were not on offer yet. Overall, the emphasis on sport and recreational tourism and the city as a platform for international business had resulted in the de-emphasising of the city's historical heritage, namely the Soviet and imperial periods. Instead, when the past was referred to directly, official city branding promoted ethnic Kazakh culture, putting emphasis on national history as a history of ethnic Kazakhs. This is in line with national memory politics and the discourse of postcoloniality popular in the post-Soviet space (Medeuova et al. 2016; Törnquist-Plewa & Yurchuk 2019).

Almaty's historical heritage: a bottom-up perspective
Alongside the official Almaty tourism department, commercial tourist organisations also participate in the city-branding effort, telling stories about Almaty's unique character in their promotional materials and guided tours. While some, as mentioned above, create and promote heritage as new tourist attractions highlighting Kazakh culture and mythology, aligned with the official narrative, other commercial initiatives focus on Almaty's imperial and Soviet heritage, emphasising the role of Russians as 'good' colonisers or the historically multi-ethnic composition of the city. The latter initiatives challenge the official emphasis on Kazakh culture by promoting an alternative vision of Almaty as a traditionally multi-ethnic city with a strong local identity, distinct from other cities of Kazakhstan.
With the development of sport and recreational tourism around Almaty, improvements in the city infrastructure and the emergence of Almaty as a transportation hub for Central Asia's famous tourist destinations-Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent-city tourism in Almaty has started to grow too. There are several big private tourism companies in Almaty monitored by the city tourism department and a few small enterprises that were launched during our fieldwork, in spring 2019. Many tourist companies organise tours to national parks in and around Almaty. These tours usually take the form of bus tours that last for several hours and are organised for particular groups of people, usually business tourists. Most of these tours need to be booked in advance and are usually taken by organised groups of people rather than random individuals gathered together.
Some private tourism companies have picked up on the ethnicisation of Almaty's city brand, gaining support from the city authorities who help with the promotion and, in some cases, development of the tourism offer. Most recently, a new ethnic mythology has been invented, linked to the ethnic rebranding of Almaty. One Kazakh entrepreneur involved in tourism has created a series of new fairy tales about Umai, the fertility goddess of the ancient Turkic peoples who, according to the legends, 'once roamed the vastness of the Great Steppe' (Zorina 2019). In a magazine article, she explained such folkloric references as an important element of nation-branding: Suddenly, it became clear that, in order to make Kazakhstan more attractive for tourists, it is necessary to find and offer some uniqueness. And this is not only about the infrastructure (hotels, cafés, restaurants, transport), or the visa regime and so on. First of all, it is about culture and history. And those people need to work hard, who are responsible for that cultural space, who have a vocation, a patriotic attitude and understanding of how to present the treasures that we have and that have been handed down to us from ancient culture in the best way. (Zorina 2019) While developing this folkloric figure based on tales transmitted in her family and references from the literature into a new symbol of Almaty was profitable for the individual entrepreneur, she framed it as a patriotic effort. The story of Umai has so far been promoted in different cultural forms: as a fairy tale translated into three languages, a compilation of music and a small theatre performance, a development that has been supported by the Kazakhstan Tourism Association, the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sports, and even the National Cinema Support Fund (Zorina 2019). As the entrepreneur explained, a centre and guided tours dedicated to Umai are under development in Almaty and surroundings, aiming to promote the legend to tourists.
'The Red Bus City Tour', another business initiative supported by the city authorities, has operated in both Nur-Sultan and Almaty since July 2019. 10 As its height prevents the bus from accessing the centre of the city (where it would hit the wires of the Almaty trolley bus), the red bus only takes tourists to a relatively new area of Almaty, focusing on the history of that part of the city. In the opening narrative, the tour provides a short overview of the history of the city as a whole: was dubbed the cradle of the independence of the young country. Nowadays, Almaty is the cultural, financial and economic centre of the republic. 11 In this narrative, Almaty's origins are situated in the distant past, based on recent archaeological discoveries. Other periods, in particular the Russian imperial period, which was until recently considered the city's foundational era, are absent.
Overall, these bottom-up commercial initiatives, combined with the top-down Kazakhisation of the city's heritage, strengthen the ethnic rebranding of Almaty by creating new attractions and inventing new stories and symbols, emphasising the Kazakhness of Almaty. In some cases, Kazakh ethnic heritage has replaced other narratives about the history of the city rather being added to it.
However, other bottom-up enterprises have started to flourish too, providing alternative interpretations of the city's past. New memory entrepreneurs have started to promote the city's imperial and Soviet heritage, offering guided tours to both locals and visitors. In spring 2019 three tourism companies started operations, focusing on thematic walking tours, benefitting from the pedestrianisation of local Arbat in the city centre, in the area of 'the golden square' where most historical buildings of the Soviet era are located.
Another company, run by a small group of women belonging to the Russian-speaking minority, has been providing thematic city tours since October 2018. 12 They provide tours such as 'Ulochki goroda Vernogo' (Streets of Vernyi City), referring to Almaty's name during the imperial period, and focus on prominent people from that time, most of whom were Russian. The tour 'Almaty Pivnaya' (Almaty, City of Beer) focuses on the development of the alcohol industry in the city and patterns of alcohol consumption in Almaty's imperial and Soviet periods. In the tour 'Almaty Kosmicheskaya' (Cosmic Almaty) they discuss the history of the space industry in Almaty and Kazakhstan, mostly during the Soviet period but not exclusively. 'Paul Gourdet-Architect of the City "Vernyi"' is a tour dedicated to a tsarist architect of French origin; other tours focus on leisure activities outside of Almaty. The women explained the lack of such tours as their inspiration; being experienced travellers themselves, they wanted to provide services similar to those in other post-Soviet capitals. 13 The city's foundation by ethnic Russians is a theme underlying all their tours. The question of who settled first in Almaty is hotly contested between ethnic Russians and ethnic Kazakhs. 14 The national government version states that various ancient tribes who united to become the modern Kazakh ethnic group should be considered the first inhabitants of the lands of Kazakhstan; other ethnic groups are considered to be recipients of traditional Kazakh hospitality towards newcomers (Cummings 2006). However, ethnic Russians were long considered to be the first settlers of Almaty. This was recently contested on the basis of a new archaeological finding-two ancient coins approximately a millennium old, bearing the word 'Almaty' as mentioned above in the narrative of 'The 11 CS3_Tour guide narrative 4 (printed script), 6 August 2019. 12 CS3_Tour guide interview 1, 25 July 2019. 13 CS3_Tour guide interview 1, 25 July 2019. 14 For example, see 'Skol'ko let Almaty?', available at: https://vernoye-almaty.kz/1000/skolko.shtml, accessed 10 January 2022.
Red Bus City Tour'. This finding became a reason to celebrate the millennium of Almaty in 2016 and to receive UNESCO recognition (UNESCO 2016), legitimising this historical claim at the international level. However, several tour guides who participated in our study, usually part of the Russian-speaking minority, doubted the authenticity of this finding and promoted the older version of Russians as the founders of the first settlement in Almaty. For example, the narrative of the tour company just discussed: So, let me start the history of our city. In 1853, the troops of Mikhail Peremyshleysky came here and crossed the River Eli. And, imagine: there was nothing here. They swam across the river Eli and then they hired camels and horses from local residents to carry everything that they had with them … and the locals were shocked: because earlier they had experienced raids from Khoqands -now a part of contemporary Uzbekistan-nobody had ever hired anything from them, it was just taken from them … . And when a couple of camels and horses died while crossing the river, they even paid the whole price for them. This was completely unexpected for the local people. In any case, this was the first encounter, and they liked that the military of the Russian Empire were reasonable people, they did not take anyone prisoner, they did not steal. Whatever they took, they paid for it. 15 This narrative promotes the idea of Russians as the original inhabitants of Almaty by highlighting that the Russians founded it on empty land. The narrative also emphasises the specific relationships of incoming Russians with the local population of Kazakhstan, describing the Russians as 'kind' and 'good' colonisers, in contrast to the neighbouring Khoqandis. To reinforce this version of the founding of Almaty, the tour guide mentioned the discovery of the coin, stating that she and her colleagues, as historians and experts, considered this insufficient evidence that the city had been inhabited for a thousand years. 16 And she continued her narrative without giving tourists the possibility to ask questions.
A tour guide from another company also expressed doubts about this version of the city's founding. She explained that Almaty has two different stories of origin, adding that: 'I think just three coins are not enough to say that it was real ancient city like Kyiv or Tbilisi. Also we don't have any other evidence … we don't have any defensive walls, like other cities have'. 17 We consider the promotion of particular ideas about the foundation of the city as a key point of contestation over a new ethnic hierarchy in the domain of memory politics. City tours in this context are important spaces for such narratives of bottom-up resistance to the promotion of Almaty as an ethnic Kazakh city.
Another narrative about imperial times from the same company promotes a discourse about Russians having a special mission as protectors and guarantors of the city's economic development: There were several bazaars in the city of Vernyi since there were active trade routes. There was a fortress, there was protection from the Russian Empire, therefore it was safe to have caravan trade routes here. Just after the Vernenskiy fortress was founded, the Silk Road crossed this region. 18 This narrative also suggests that, before the foundation of an imperial settlement, there were no trade routes in this region, thus downplaying any claims about an ancient settlement with its own bazaars where millennium-old coins could have originated.
Another important narrative promoted by Russian-speaking tour guides is that the city's contemporary multiculturalism has its roots in the Russian imperial foundation of the city. A Russian tour guide referred to the presence of Tatars in the early history of Almaty, implying that the presence of various ethnic groups in the city is a legacy of Imperial Russia: Almost any city in the Russian Empire, especially cities with some military fortifications, had a Tatar settlement. Similar to the European cities [meaning the cities in the European part of the Russian Empire] it is also not by chance that it appeared here. It appeared fairly quickly, when the soldiers who built the fortress were still living in tents. 19 The promotion of multiculturalism as a distinctive characteristic of the city was present in other tour narratives. Some of these narratives highlighted multiculturalism as characteristic of the whole country and, consequently, Almaty too: More than a hundred nationalities live in the city and in Kazakhstan, somewhere around 120-130. Therefore, there are also many religious confessions. On the left side we are passing a small church, we have over 40 mosques, also Christian churches, Orthodox, Lutheran, Catholic. Here you see the church of the saints Peter and Paul. There is a Jewish synagogue, a small Buddhist temple and so on. 20 By accentuating the presence of Tatars, Uighurs, Dungans and other ethnic groups in the city, not to mention Russians, tour guides promote an image of Almaty as a polyethnic city that might be especially appealing to an international audience.
While some tour guides actively challenge the top-down emphasis on Kazakh ethnic heritage, other guides promote versions that combine elements of both perspectives. For example, an ethnic Kazakh tour guide combined the narrative of Almaty's ancient origins with an acknowledgment of the special protective role of Russians: The history of the city is closely connected with the history of the state, which is also quite significant. A long time ago, a thousand years ago, various tribes lived here. The Kazakh people only formed as an ethnicity [narodnost'] in the fifteenth century. At this time three powerful territorial and economic regions formed here: [one of them was] Zhuz, headed by khans. But protecting the vast territory … was very difficult. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the young Khan Abulkhair turned to a more powerful neighbour-Tsarist Russia-with a request to become a subject of the Russian Empire [poddanstvo], so that Russia could help to protect these lands. And in general, the dreams of Abulkhair Khan came true, because he dreamt of an independent state, of an undivided state, a powerful state and, in principle, this is what has happened. 21 The above quote is a telling example of an attempt to avoid contested memories. As Lillis (2018, p. 110) writes, the idea that the Kazakhs invited the Russians in for protection suits Russians historically and today, as it fits neatly with a view of Russia as a benevolent big brother rather than an expansionist coloniser. While this narrative mobilises the idea of Russians as 'good' colonisers, at the same time it embeds it within a narrative that highlights the significance of Kazakhstan's independent statehood.
Alongside Russian imperial history, tour companies also promote the Soviet legacy of the city, such as in a recent initiative of a Kazakh woman, descended from the former cultural elite, who was nostalgic about the Soviet times of her early childhood. The Instagram account of her 'sightseeing tour agency' advertises 'nostalgic excursions' and 'walking tours in Almaty'. 22 At the time of our fieldwork this company had just started up, offering two thematic walking tours: 'Almaty Neformal'naya' (Informal Almaty) after a famous book by Kazakh writer Arsen Bayanov about the underground culture of Almaty in Brezhnev times, and 'Cultural Walks', about the lives of famous writers, opera singers, architects and other cultural and academic elites who lived in Almaty in Soviet times.
The woman described her motivation for starting this company in terms of the intergenerational transmission of memory: My family, my grandfathers, were famous opera singers, my grandmother was a ballet dancer. My family was connected to the theatre, music. My uncle, he is an opera singer too, he is a recognised singer in the whole post-Soviet space, everyone knows him … . And I live in this building; it is considered to be in the old city centre of Almaty, and there were famous people living in every building in the Soviet days. When you are passing by, you can see various memorial plaques … . People called my building 'the house of artists'. When I came up with the idea for the company, I initially targeted not tourists but our youth. … And although the era is gone, I would like to keep some kind of memory, so that people know. 23 This case reflects Alima Bissenova's observation about the intersection of class, culture and mobility in Almaty (Bissenova 2017, p. 660). It is not only ethnic Russian guides who engage in alternative heritage practices but also ethnic Kazakhs, who use pasts that are de-emphasised in official city-branding efforts to preserve the privileged class identity that they had gained during the Soviet period.

Conclusion
Remembering is as much about imagination as it is about recollection, as much about the present and future as about the past (Keightley & Pickering 2012 to select what is considered important and worth preserving; in a postcolonial setting, this is often driven by a desire to come to terms with the past and redress past injustices and also to project a new identity, independent of the former colonisers. This article provided a detailed analysis of the memory politics of city-branding practices in Almaty, a multi-ethnic city shaped by Russian imperial rule, and showed the contested nature of the historical narratives and symbols considered of key importance. The consideration of official city-branding efforts shows us how, despite the significance of the Russian imperial and Soviet pasts, city authorities have deliberately left these pasts out of their promotional texts, portraying Almaty as a city of sports and leisure and, more recently, emphasising its Kazakh roots, in line with the national narrative of ancient Kazakh statehood. These new urban identity narratives replace the idea of Almaty as an imperial settlement founded by Russians and, more generally, the narrative of Russians as 'good colonisers' who brought civilisation and progress to an empty land. Changing the narrative in this way also changes the ethnic hierarchy in the city by downplaying Russian contributions to the development of the city and thus the status of Russians within the city.
An in-depth examination of city tour narratives provides a more complex picture of city branding efforts, showing diverse narratives of the city that highlight various historical periods and accentuating one of different interpretations of the contested past. We show how ethnic Russian tour guides and some Kazakh guides resist these top-down narratives by positively highlighting both imperial and Soviet pasts in their guided city tours. They mobilise memory to construct Almaty as a multicultural city and to emphasise the role of Russians or, more generally, the privileged class identities of the former elites. The narrative on the foundation of the city, and thus on its authentic inhabitants, is the most contested one today and serves an important symbolic function in the struggle over the city's ethnic hierarchy. In contrast to the forgetting of Almaty's Soviet and Russian heritage in official city branding, several tour guides revitalise the memory of these periods, using their position as experts and cultural intermediaries to circulate their preferred interpretation of the past.
We could read these different versions of place-branding as an attempt to cater for different international tourist audiences, who might be interested in different aspects of Almaty's past. While this may well be the case, we argue that the place-branding projects cannot be explained by business interests or tourist demands alone but reflect different ideas of belonging and ethnic hierarchies that have been subject to contestation in independent Kazakhstan. The official Kazakh discourse on multiculturalism has limited the opportunities for Russian political claim-making and has made any promotion of special position of ethnic Russians in Kazakhstani society difficult. Tour guiding provides an opportunity for Russians to articulate their visions of the Kazakh state and conceptions of Russian rootedness and belonging within a context that is considered not political. It shows opposition to the official rebranding of Almaty, but does so largely unnoticed, performed for small audiences and in an entertaining and educational way. While they may appear trivial, the seemingly apolitical practices of tour guiding create real arenas for contestation of new ethnic hierarchies in Kazakhstani society.
If we understand city branding not only in the context of official branding campaigns but more broadly as promotional practice that involves telling stories about a place to create an attractive place identity, we need to include multiple actors in the analysis and consider the incoherence and tensions embedded in the ways they present a place. A consideration of both top-down and bottom-up practices allows us to gain a fuller picture of the city-branding process and shows a diversity of memories and heritage seen as relevant for the city as well as tensions between different versions communicated to visitors. Particularly in the post-Soviet context, where nation-building projects are often ethnicised or critical of the Soviet past, such an approach is crucial to understanding the variety of identity projects disseminated to visitors.