When utopian desire for the future is lost and uncertainty in the present increases, the political signigicance of the past ands its social value dramatically increase. Alongside, and in between, history and memory -- Modernity's two meganarratives of the past --there evolves still another mode of transmission of the past and its accomodation in the present. In this book, this third mode, restoration, is analyzed as a professional practice and part of museum science as well as, in a wider meaning, as a third discourse critically opposed both to history and memory. Restoration is a domain of practical measures and strategic manipulation with material and value-related constitution of historical artefacts undertaken for their enrichment with symbolic and material value. In a broader sense, restoration is analyzed as a symbolic machine for the appropriation of the past by the present and the use of the past for the present moment's own purposes.  Restoration's imagination, techniques, and institutional practices play an important role in the creation of national and imperial  ideologies of history, mass movements of historical monument preservation, and commercialization of cultural heritage, the patrimonializartion of the past in symbolic commodity exchange. Special attention is given to specific strategies of the desirable past within the framework of the symbolic political economy of socialism,  in Soviet restoration and more generally, in the evolution of the Soviet cult of the historical monument.