The study of memory and politics in Russia and eastern Europe has attracted significant attention in recent years. Scholars regarded this issue as mostly divided between anti-communism and nostalgia in the aftermath of 1989 revolutions and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Yet, as Alena Pfoser’s recent book Tourism as Memory Making shows, memory-making in the post-Soviet space is a multifaceted process shaped by multiple actors and distinct local contexts. As memory-making in post-socialist eastern Europe has been treated mostly from the perspective of cultural institutions, which in most instances have been subsidized by the state, and of actors associated with these institutions, the book’s emphasis on tourism significantly nuances this discussion.

Tourism as Memory Making examines the cultural politics of Russian tourism to Tallinn, Kyiv, and Almaty, three cities that used to be part of the Russian Empire and then the USSR. Pfoser wants to see how Russian tourists are seen when traveling abroad to these cities and how they interact with both the built environment and the tourist guides who are accompanying them and their narratives. This perspective allows her to assess broader processes, such as “the production and contestation of cultural memories in transnational encounters between Russian tourists and their hosts” (3). The main question the book sets to answer is how cultural memories have been produced through both the interactions between tour guides and tourists and between tourists and the material artifacts at these destinations. Similarly, Pfoser also wants to assess how memory-making in tourism has shaped identities and international relations in the post-Soviet space today. The book seeks to answer these important questions by looking at both the institutional policies of memory-making in tourism and how tourist guides and tourists themselves have shaped these processes.

Taking ordinary people’s voices into account is, in fact, one of the key achievements of this book, as existing scholarship has mostly focused on political and cultural elites. Most importantly, the book sees remembering as a social process which is mediated by interaction between tourists and the material environment at their destinations but also by the historical contexts in which these visits are taking place, with one significant example being the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, followed by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. These political events but also the imperial legacy of the Russian Empire and of the USSR have shaped how Russian tourists are perceived or even welcomed in the three studied cities. As the book makes clear, memory politics in Ukraine, Estonia, and Kazakhstan also affected the ways public space was shaped in the examined cities. While Kyiv and Tallinn attempted to remove the Russian/Soviet heritage, Almaty integrated it into its own national rhetoric. This speaks both about the relationship between center and periphery and about post-colonialism in the Soviet and post-Soviet space, which the book so brilliantly describes.

The book is split in eight chapters, which are thematically divided between the three modes of remembering Pfoser is analyzing in her book: nostalgia, the production and consumption of natural difference, and memory diplomacy. The Introduction counts as Ch. 1 in the book, while Ch. 2 revolves around theoretical discussions about memory-making. Chapter 3 centers on the historical context and provides an overview of Russian history and the interconnections between empire and tourism, as well as on the growth of tourism industries in the post-Soviet context in Estonia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Chapter 4 describes tourist offers in Tallinn, Kyiv, and Almaty and concludes that in all three cities tour guides were more concerned with offering high services than presenting an ideologized version of history and memory-making. Chapter 5 focuses on nostalgia and shows how both tour guides and tourists negotiated the historical past by focusing on digestible stories while emphasizing recent economic development and shared history as part of their assumed “cultural intimacy.” By contrast, Ch. 6 focuses on differences. When visiting these three cities, Russian tourists were not only interested in their shared imperial past but also in the specificities of each destination. Hence, medieval heritage was highlighted in all cases, from German legacy in Tallinn to the Silk Road in Almaty. Chapter 7 introduces the concept of “memory diplomacy” as a means of dealing with difficult heritage, such as the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn or the Museum of Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv. Chapter 8 serves as the Conclusion of the book and invites the reader to see memory making in tourism as a processual, productive, transnational, and political phenomenon, while also stressing the importance of memory commodification in this process.

Based on comparative ethnography, qualitative methods, participant observation, and more than 100 interviews, Alena Pfoser’s book makes an important contribution to grasping the complex issue of memory politics and memory-making in the convoluted post-Soviet space for both an academic and general readership.