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The article presents a brief overview of contemporary debates on the politics of memory in Russian and English-speaking cultural studies. In Russian studies, the focus is on the loss of national identity and the crisis of professional standards in historiography. The main bearers of memory are state institutions and the academic community of historians. From this point of view, the global neoliberal elites are contractors and bearers of threats to national identity, which can only be resisted by preserving established traditions and building binary oppositions of “our'” and “alien”. In English-speaking studies, the emphasis is predominantly on cross-cultural dialogue and interdisciplinary cooperation, which involves revision of the boundaries between history, anthropology, psychology and social research. The key memory carriers are individuals and (informal) cultural communities, which are always engaged and cannot follow the positivist criteria of scientific objectivity of the 19th century model. Contractors and bearers of threats here are the conservative nationalist institutions and states that restrict private practices of commemoration. Both these models prove to be limited and contain internal contradictions. This is especially true for the transcultural dialogue and maintenance of academic standards, which are impossible in the conditions of constructing “our” – “alien” opposition. In this respect, an important function of research on memory and culture as a whole can be a rethinking of the very binary nature of these oppositions and the rejection of alarmism, largely caused by the specifics of the modern (present day) temporal regime, which tries to completely control and subjugate both the past and the future.