On the road between the city centre and the airport, alongside the river and near the old Petro-Kazakhstan oil worker residential blocks, a series of abandoned factory buildings are decorated with Soviet-era murals. These large-scale frescoes depict the ideals of Soviet industry — workers, technology, and collective effort — painted in the bold, simplified style of Soviet propaganda art.
The factories themselves have been empty since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The murals are slowly fading and peeling but remain striking in their scale and ambition. It is an accidental open-air museum of a vanished ideological moment. Worth looking out for if you're heading to or from the airport, even if just from the window of a taxi.