The article is devoted to the scientific and pedagogical activity of the staff of the Department of Contemporary History of Russia of the Historical Faculty (Institute of History) of the Leningrad / St. Petersburg State University. Established in 1968, the department passed a complex path of formation and development. Her birth was the result of the growing interest of Soviet society in the problems of modern Russian history and, at the same time, the manifestation of organizational abilities V.A.Ovsyankin, who became her first manager. He made a lot of efforts to ensure that after several decades the department turned into one of the leading centers of the country to study the history of Russia's political parties, the Great Russian Revolution of 1917, the Civil War, the history of the battle for Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War, the foreign policy of the USSR, problems of modern Russia.