MOSCOW, September 5 (RIA Novosti) - The Moscow government has pledged to complete restoration work on a giant 1930s Soviet-era statue and have the monument back in its rightful place by 2010, a source in the city administration said on Friday.

Restoration work on the 24.5-meter high statue, The Worker and the Peasant Woman, by Vera Mukhina, was launched in 2003. Moscow authorities originally said it would be back and fully restored in 2005. Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov gave instructions in late August that the restoration work be speeded up.

"Restoration of the monument's pedestal will come out of the city budget...and will be completed by 2010," the source said.

He added that a museum and an exhibition center would be located under the giant statue, one of the most prominent on Moscow's city landscape.

The famous statue was made for the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937. It has since been replicated in thousands of posters, cards, stamps and became a logo for the then-Soviet and now Russian film studio Mosfilm in the 1970s.

The statue, made from sheets of stainless steel, is a classic example of socialist realism art. The worker's arm holds aloft a hammer and the peasant woman a sickle - two primary symbols of the Soviet Union.

Although the statue met the task of ideological glorification, it reflected the author's inclination to might and love for the grandiose. As the sculptor put it, it is "a breakthrough into the future, to the light and the sun, to the feeling of human strength."