K. D. Ushinsky State Academic Pedagogical Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) was founded in 1925 as a reference library of the Information Department of Soviet Russia’s People’s Commissariat of Education. In 1933 the library received the status of a state library specializing in education, and in 1942 it moved to its present location at 3, Bolshoi Tolmachevsky Lane, a group of historic buildings constructed in the late 18th – early 19th cc. by architect M. Kazakov. In 1944 library was received into the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the Russian Federation and, later, the Soviet Union, and in 1945, it was given the name of K. D. Ushinsky, a renowned Russian educator.

The library bears its current full name since 1970. It is the largest specialized library in Russia and the country’s largest repository of books on education, the main information and reference center in the field of pedagogy and education, and a major academic and instructional center for school and college libraries, boasting more than 1,500,000 copies of books and other materials in education, methodology and pedagogy.