The article considers the question of how highly qualified personnel of history teachers with academic degrees and titles in universities of the Urals were formed in the first third of the twentieth century. It is concluded that in the pre-revolutionary period, history was taught to students by masters of history evacuated from Petrograd at the only university in the region in Perm. During the Soviet period, there were three stages of higher education reform1918 -the beginning of the 1920s, the 1920s-1930s, the end of the 1930s-before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, each of which had its own criteria for the formation of highly qualified personnel. There was complete confusion in the issue of certification of scientific personnel. It was only by the end of the period under study that the country developed the usual system of awarding academic degrees and titles. Until the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the region did not have its own certification system for scientific personnel. History teachers who worked at universities in the Urals defended their dissertations at universities and scientific institutions in Moscow and Leningrad.