Officials in Kazakhstan announced in 2001 that they were planning to build a new recreational park in the foothills of Almaty, the former capital and largest city of the oil-rich Central Asian country. The local government allocated 61 hectares of land along the road leading to the picturesque Alma-Arasan Gorge in Almaty’s Bostandyq district. Initially, the new park was to be named 21st Century. The construction work lasted nearly a decade before the city park was officially opened in the summer of 2011. It also received a new name: the Park of the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan. In early January, protests over a sudden fuel-price hike quickly…