A large corpus of the documents residing in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, which have been introduced into the scholarly circulation for the first time, makes the background for the uncovering of an interesting page in the history of Crimean intellectuals under the circumstances of the changing political powers. This paper reveals the transformation of the Historical-Philological Faculty of the Taurida University, considered the "nursery of bourgeois culture" by the Bolsheviks, into the Department of Oriental Studies (1921) and the Faculty of Oriental Studies (1922), thus preserving the unique teaching staff and the students. The ideas of the necessity of the creation of the centre of oriental (Tatar) studies at the Taurida University were in the air even before the launching of the first Crimean institution of higher learning. This project was successfully realized in the framework of the M. V. Frunze Crimean State University after the establishment of the Soviet power. The creators of the department (faculty) were Professors M. O. Gredinger and A. N. Derevitskii. They created curricula and manning tables for the faculty which were discovered in the archive. These documents show that the education comprised two branches, linguistic (training of the teachers of Crimean Tatar and Persian languages) and administrative (training of administrators for the offices of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Social republic). It was planned to replace the three-year-long teaching with four-year courses. The reverse transformation of the Faculty of Oriental Studies back into a branch at the Pedagogic Faculty was related to the lack of considerable academic basis and the applications for the training of administrative staff. An interesting practice in the organization of teaching process at the Department of Oriental Studies on the eve of its transformation into the Branch of Crimean Tatar Language and Literature was the invitation of leading Soviet scholars, Academician I. Yu. Krachkovskii in 1924 among others, to deliver educative courses. Despite all the background of further perspective works, the oriental studies centre in the Crimea was liquidated. Among the reasons was the transformation of the classical university into the pedagogical institution of higher learning.
