The article analyzes the peculiarities of obtaining historical education in the USSR in the era of the beginning of the transition to «restalinization» at the turn of 1960-1970 on the basis of the use of sources of personal origin. The Ural State University named after A.M. Gorky (USU), the history department of which the author of this article graduated in 1972, was an average regional university of the country. However, in the field of historical education, there were processes in this educational institution that often went beyond the typical peripheral university. The article considers the peculiarities of the organization of the educational process at the faculty of history, describes some teachers, their approach to teaching the subjects being read, the situation that has developed at the faculty. Naturally, the observations of the author of the article are subjective. However, the author allows them to be expressed, given that by now a significant and unique array of sources of personal origin has accumulated, allowing for the reconstruction of the processes that took place at the historical faculty of USU. The essence of these processes, in our opinion, was that the change in the policy of the ruling party at the turn of 1960-1970 was directly embodied in the teaching of social and historical disciplines at the «ideological» faculty. Students who received a historical education at USU during these years saw with their own eyes the struggle between the old and the new in teaching.