The history of African Studies in Russia goes back to the 19th century. Traditionally two fields were most developed - Egyptology and Ethiopian Studies. Several Russian explorers travelled to East Africa and the Horn of Africa at the end of that century. After the 1917 revolution, more attention was paid to the anti-colonial struggle of the African peoples and the workers’ movement.

The first centres of African Studies were created in the early 1930s in Moscow as an African cabinet in the short-lived Scientific Research Association for the Study of National and Colonial Problems and die African Section of the so-called Communist University of the Toiling Peoples of the East. In 1945 the Department of African Languages was founded at the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) State University, followed by the African Section in the Institute of Ethnography and the African Department in the Institute for Oriental Studies.