As faith in the future is lost and uncertainty in the present grows, the political significance and social value of the past increase. Along with the two main discourses - history and memory - there is a third form of transmission and existence of the past in the present. Irina Sandomirskaya proposes the concept of restoration for this category. her book explores restoration as a field of practical and strategic action involving state manipulation of the materiality and value of specific artifacts of the past, as well as the enrichment of their symbolic and material value in the present. What role do imagination and restoration practices play in the creation of national and imperial ideologies of history, mass conservation movements, and the commercialization of cultural heritage? What strategies for recreating the desired past did the Soviet restoration, in particular, use? and what are the insoluble contradictions between the protective desires of modern man - a subject of the era of total destruction - and the past that constantly eludes him? Irina Sandomirskaya is a professor at the University of Södertörn, a specialist in Soviet culture, and a candidate of philological sciences. winner of the Andrei Bely Prize for the book “Blockade in the Word. Essays on critical theory and the biopolitics of language."