Published memoirs of academician Lev Vladimirovich Cherepnin, a world-famous historian, an authoritative specialist in medieval Russia, cover almost half a century of the life of the country and society. The memoirs contained the facts of his biography in the stream of events of the First World War, the October Revolution and the Civil War in Russia, the NEP period and the first Stalinist repressions, the Great Patriotic War. At the turn of the 1970s. the author comprehended how in his personal destinies a student, graduate student, prisoner, researcher, associate professor refracted the most difficult, sometimes tragic stages of the formation of Soviet historical science.