This introductory chapter outlines the book’s two main aims. Firstly, the book provides the first English-language account of the cultural politics of Russian tourism to the former Soviet states. Based on a comparison of three cities, the book examines the production and contestation of cultural memories in transnational tourism encounters between Russian tourists and their hosts. Secondly, the book uses the case of Russian tourism to make an intervention in the field of memory studies and advance a number of general theoretical arguments in relation to how to study memory-making in tourism, highlighting its processual, politically generative, transnational characteristics, and diverse cultural forms. The chapter also provides an overview of the significance of Russian tourism, discusses changes in historical context, and outlines how memory-making in tourism is approached methodologically.