Wishes to protect landmarks of the Soviet period are commonly believed to stem from a deep-rooted sense of post-Soviet nostalgia shared by some of those who lived under real socialism. Yet this explanatory model can hardly elucidate the motivation that drove a young and amorphous activist group composed of a law graduate, an architect, an economist, a philologist, and a software engineer, who were all born almost a decade after the end of the Soviet Union. This article seeks to reconstruct the struggle of the activist group and their quest for reclaiming the abandoned Soviet-era planetarium as an object of the public domain. To this end, the author not only conducted a series of in-depth interviews with the activist group but, in 2021, also participated in various court hearings at the Supreme Court (verkhovniy sud). Empirical evidence is further complemented by a thorough review of
local media resources and secondary literature related to urban politics and the right to the city, as well as the cultural history of Soviet space exploration and its relevance in the Kyrgyzstani context. On the one hand, the paper explores the different motives and worldviews of the activists and the ways in which these affected their visions to appropriate and re-evaluate the material legacy of an iconic site representative of socialist-era astronomy and space travel. On the other hand, it meticulously reconstructs the legal dispute over privatization which ultimately ended in the failure to save the planetarium from irrevocable destruction. Here it argues that the contradictory stance of the Kyrgyzstani courts – first recognizing the claims and then declaring the planetarium “unclaimable” – reveals the fundamental paradox that characterizes the relationship between present-day “post-socialist” state power and the material legacy of the ancien régime