The article attempts to describe and analyze the dialectic of the historical memory of Kazakhstan society on the example of the urban cultural heritage of the Middle Ages and the XX century. With the inclusion of the territory of Kazakhstan in the legal and sociocultural space of the Russian Empire, the process of revitalization and construction of historical and cultural heritage began, which allowed to continue its development in the Soviet period at a qualitatively different methodological level, and then in the period after 1991 to consolidate its status of ethno-historical wealth, legitimizing autochthonism, antiquity, and the mobilizing discourse of nation-building. Despite the fact that the heritage of urban culture of the Middle Ages was discovered and studied first by scientists of the Russian Empire, and then by Soviet (including Kazakhstan scientists) archaeologists, in the public discourse that forms the historical memory this process after 1991 imagined as the long-awaited release from captivity of the "Eurocentric" ideas about the Kazakhs as eternal nomads. The presence of urban culture is represented in this mobilizing discourse of ethnicity as a conspiracy theories hidden back to the Kazakh people only after independence. At the same time, in the modern city of Almaty, the urbanistic legacy of Soviet modernism continues to go into the irrelevant past: both in architecture and in other spheres of culture.