The article analyzes the creation of a system of training ar-chaeologists in Russian universities in the 1920s. In 1922, the reformed Archaeological institutes in Petrograd and Moscow were attached to universities and on their basis launched a successful work of Archaeological departments. Less successful were attempts to train archaeologists in a number of regional universities. In the early 1930s. in the course of an ill–conceived reorganization of universities, a marked ideologization of liberal education and the forcible introduction of vulgar Marxism into science and higher education, the archaeological departments were closed. It was only in the second half of the 1930s that archaeologists were able to restore their training.