The history of St. Petersburg school of psychology has not been sufficiently studied if compared to foreign and Moscow scientific schools. The article provides new specific information on the institutionalization of psychology in Leningrad in the postwar period due to the establishment of the department and division, and later on, in 1966, the Faculty of Psychology at Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University. The author specifies the facts regarding the influence of historical cataclysms, postwar political events, ideological campaigns on the development of psychological science and education: The Great Patriotic war, “the struggle against cosmopolitanism”, Joint Session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences focused on the teachings of I.P. Pavlov, changes in the country's situation and sciences during the “Soviet thaw”, etc. The consequences of these events resulted in the abrupt suspension of communications with foreign colleagues in 1948. The reestablishment and expansion of international contacts occurred in the second half of the 1950s. The information concerning the scientific school staff and B.G. Ananyev's remarkable contribution to the school focused establishment in the course of his hard daily work as Head of Psychology Department at the university, Dean of the Faculty of Psychology, and Director of the Research Institute of Pedagogy has been supplemented. The facts about B.G. Ananyev's initiatives to create the Institute of Comprehensive Social Studies within Leningrad University, the laboratory of differential psychology and anthropology, and to organize comprehensive studies of human individuality have been documented. The author establishes the date when Ananyev began vigorously writing his book “Man as a Subject of Cognition” (1963). The development of St. Petersburg school of psychology was uneven, often against the odds. The collective work style at school was democratic and creative. The school educated professional psychologists; the best of them became prominent figures in the national science. The article presents a new periodization of St. Petersburg school of psychology, which identifies the Bekhterev, post-Bekhterev, Ananyev and post-Ananyev development periods.