The article is devoted to the transition period in the history of St. Petersburg University, associated with the choice of a model for its development, and the first years of existence in its own status after the transformation of 1819, to which it owes a consistent reformist policy of the curator of the metropolitan educational district S.S. Uvarov. Uvarov’s merits in the field of Russian education and science were belittled for a long time; outside the research field, his activities as a curator of the Petersburg school district (1811-1821) remained. Uvarov’s position during the years of the Ministry of Education (1833-1849) was not identical to the ideology and administrative practice of European-oriented reformism that distinguished Uvarov in the 1810s. and which he later ironically called “administrative Saint-Simonism.” On the basis of archival materials of departmental and university office work, the authors present the causes and stages of a conservative turn in the policies of the Ministry of Spiritu