Fifty Years of a Department

The article is dedicated to the 50-th anniversary of the Slavonic Languages Department of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Regional Studies at Lomonosov Moscow State University. The article describes the life of the department through the eyes of a teacher, who has had the luck of being a member of its staff all these years. With teaching Bulgarian as an example, the article traces the transformation of the department from being an interfaculty one attributed to the Philological Faculty to gaining the status of a department that produces graduates with majors in Slavonic languages at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Regional Studies. The author describes challenges that the department has faced and analyses the unfortunate reasons why the department has stopped administering majors in Slavonic languages. The author concludes that the department is a living organism directly related to the country’s life and depending on its strategy in development of education.