Siberian forestry institute: formation of the old Krasnoyarsk educational institution

An urgent and promising task of Russian historiography is a balanced analysis of the experience of building a Soviet higher school, taking into account specific historical conditions and interregional specifics, with the introduction of new sources and approaches in the spirit of anthropological turn into scientific circulation. The article deals with one of the authoritative provincial universities of the USSR, the formation of which took place during the years of the first five-year plans. The early history of the Siberian Forestry Engineering Institute is unique and typical at the same time. Together with the country's higher school, it experienced one of the most radical educational reforms, went through many problems and difficulties of reassignment, creating a material base from scratch, hard breaking and searching for new forms of organization of the educational process, the formation of teaching staff and student body. In a short time, it was possible to lay the foundations of a regional higher vocational education focused on the mass graduation of Soviet engineers, their targeted training and close connection with production. A lot of mistakes and distortions were on this way. They were partially corrected in hot pursuit by building ties with the profile people's commissariat and labor faculty, restoring a five-year period of study and the balance between general and single-discipline training of specialists, abandoning simplified forms of teaching and certification of students. But there were irreparable losses incurred from the establishment of a repressive-bureaucratic regime. A study from the perspective of the author’s concept of living history allows us to scientifically reconstruct and humanize the initial stage of the history of a particular institute, and with it the entire higher education system of a large Russian region, as well as to draw universally significant conclusions and formulate practical recommendations.