The article is devoted to the history of the development of Oriental Studies at the Department of General History of Gorky State University in 1946-1974. Based on archival materials, namely: summary records of the meetings of the department and memoirs of employees and graduates of the department, an analysis of the basic and special courses taught by teachers of the Department of General History in Oriental Studies was made, achievements and problems in teaching and studying the history of the countries of the Afro-Asian region in this period were analyzed. An analysis of the documents indicates that the department has done a lot of work to include the history of Eastern countries in the educational process. Despite the acute shortage of specialists in Oriental Studies, the teaching staff was able to develop and test basic courses on ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary history of Asia and Africa. Students were offered several special courses in Oriental and African Studies. The lack of teaching of oriental languages at Gorky State University and the insufficiency of the source base for research on oriental topics in the provincial closed city did not allow Nizhny Novgorod scientists and students to engage in “pure” Oriental Studies. Nevertheless, there were undergraduate and graduate students at the department who chose Orientalist subjects as the subject of their research. In the 1950s-1970s the Department of General History prepared two candidate dissertations (A.Ya. Levin, O.A. Kolobov) and a doctoral dissertation (V.G. Borukhovich) on related topics. The department was a platform for discussing important methodological and theoretical problems of historical science, issues of historiography and source studies, including oriental studies and African studies. All these facts ultimately made it possible to train its own staff, increase the number of history departments at GSU and paved the way for the creation of the department of history of Asian and African countries and the inclusion of oriental languages in the university’s curriculum.
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