During perestroika and the post-perestroika period, teaching the history of Russia was characterised by difficulties of interpretation, which was especially true in technical higher educational establishments. The authors analyse the contribution of Ural historians to the process of teaching history as a multi-conceptual system. The authors share their doubts and arguments about the period in question and describe the process of interaction among the staff of different educational institutions. They refer to concepts from 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century Russian schools of history, such as V. N. Tatishchev, N. M. Karamzin, S. M. Solovyov, V. O. Klyuchevskoy, M. N. Pokrovsky, L. N. Gumilyov, etc. As to their working hypothesis on the optimality of teaching, they single out several approaches to explaining the historical process. The political preferences of modern historians led to a number of interpretations of the universal historical approach, which perceives history as a unified process of the incremental development of peoples, i. e. liberal, Marxist, and technological. These interpretations were reflected in several textbooks published by the Department of History of USTU-UPI between 1992 and 2002. All of them rely on principles of equally respectful treatment, interpretations of Russian history and their presentation as part of an academic curriculum.