Today, however, the heroicism of the Arman bas-reliefs doesn't bother Bopesh at all. "I don't see them as something challenging for a modern person. After all, when we look at the paintings of Caravaggio or Raphael, for example, we talk about their artistic value, not about how they functioned as religious propaganda. This is the legacy of that era, that's the way it was. It would be very foolish now to erase these bas-reliefs and replace them with something else. It would be a sign of provincial thinking, of squalor and intellectual poverty. Cities have a different culture because they try to preserve their history," says Bopesh.

Svetlana Romashkina, Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine Vlast, also grew up in Alma-Ata, but a generation later than Bopesh. By then, Socialist propaganda was already fading into the past, discredited, and society was rapidly changing, with new ideas emerging like perestroika (restructuring), uskoreniye (acceleration), and glasnost (transparency). For a long time, Svetlana never noticed the Arman bas-reliefs and other works of monumental art - just as people never notice things from everyday life."

To appreciate it, it's not enough to just grow up with it or get used to it. You have to know a place's history, to really look at it, to constantly pay attention to it and see it as special. If I had a child, I would show them all these mosaics and bas-reliefs, and I would try to explain them – how this painstaking work is done, how an artist thinks and what the time was like when he created these images," says Svetlana.

Nargiz Shukenova, director of the Batyrkhan Shukenov Foundation and producer of the Clique Film Festival, could be considered a Millennial. She doesn't attempt to judge the Arman bas-reliefs. "It's very difficult to judge something retrospectively, especially since any form of art can be considered propaganda for certain values. Cultural products – art, theater, cinema or anything else – give us a way to reflect on these values, so I support preserving artifacts of bygone eras. They represent a collective memory of our past. Today we're able to reflect on that era's tragedies – repressions, famine, the death of the Aral Sea, nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk, and this should be a very important mission for all of us. Past generations may have been misled, but I'm not sure that means I'm ready to have some kind of conflict with them," says Nargiz.

Her father Baurzhan Shukenov, the current director of the cinema, worked in Qyzylorda in the 1980s, but he was often sent to the capital on business, staying at the Hotel Kazakhstan and trying to get into screenings at Arman. In his opinion, the propagandistic elements of the bas-reliefs not only accrue historic value over time, as testament to the past, but also as Socialist Realist works of art, made in the style of their time. "This art, being 'national in form and socialist in content,' is still modern, because it tells us about the ideology that prevailed back then and about the people of that time, about our parents," he believes.

"Today we see it not just as the propaganda of an empire that has sunk into oblivion, but as an element of the architecture that makes the city and the building special. The scenes seen here – about man going to space, about the conquest of 'virgin lands', about scientific progress - tell only part of the story. No one was allowed to depict a cult of personality, or to show collectivization and repressions in a bas-relief, and even today no one does it. What is monumental art in Kazakhstan today - a monument to the President or a statue of a camel in Gorky Park?" asks Svetlana.