The book by architectural historians Anna Bronovitskaya, Nikolai Malinin and photographer Yuri Palmin includes more than 60 objects — from a circus and a market to palaces of culture and housing — in a variety of architectural styles created between the Khrushchev reform and the collapse of the USSR. Anna Bronovitskaya and Nikolai Malinin examine each building in the broad context of cultural, social and political history. In their research, the authors relied on both documents and interviews with Almaty architects, historians, current and former residents of the city. Yuri Palmin's photography, revealing the aesthetics of the buildings or recording their distortions, is supplemented by rich archival material — drawings, design perspectives, historical photographs. The architectural guide can also be viewed as a book about the history of the "golden age" of the old capital of Kazakhstan, an international and enlightened city with its own unique face, which attracted talented architects and artists from different parts of the Soviet Union. Today, Alma-Ata can be called the "capital of Soviet modernism." While its former architectural rivals — Yerevan and Kyiv, Tashkent and Minsk — have lost their heritage from the 1960s to 1980s, Alma-Ata has not suffered such heavy losses: in 1997, the capital's functions were transferred to Astana, which took up the architectural representation of independent Kazakhstan. Alma-Ata remains a functioning museum of Soviet modernism, where you can see the world's first transparent library, the first postmodern skyscraper in the USSR, and a dam built by the most powerful directed explosion in history.