Academician Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold (1869-1930) once noted that studying the history of the Turks from primary sources requires skills that are rarely combined in one person, because if you take at least languages, you need to know perfectly, except for Turkic, at least Arabic, Persian and Chinese, and also have a lot of special knowledge. He himself - a Turkologist, Arabist, Islamic scholar, historian, archivist, philologist, polyglot - was just such a person, representing a rare type of encyclopedist scientist. V.V. Bartold relied in his works on many sources and, like no one else, thanks to his deep knowledge, he was able to compare and analyze them. A course of lectures on the history of the Turkic peoples was written by him at the request of the Turkish government, read in Turkish at the University of Istanbul in June 1926 and later translated into major European languages. This work, which has become a classic of Turkic studies, remains relevant to this day, but its advantage is also that it is written extremely simply and is aimed at the average reader.