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Abstract: The active development of the domestic education system at the present stage is due to certain historical and social processes. With this in mind, an attempt was made to analyze the genesis of the formation of the preschool level of education from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. Usually, in such an analysis, periodization is built on the basis of a purely historical approach to the designation of stages: before 1917, 50–60s XX century and so on, which is also typical of works on the history of preschool pedagogy. Here, a periodization is proposed, reflecting in the name of the stages the content of the dominant at that time direction of development of preschool education in Russia. It seems that the genesis of preschool education includes the following stages: propaedeutic (60s of the XIX century – 1916), where the origin and formation of preschool education took place; empirical (1917–1940s), associated with the formation of public preschool education in a new state formation; theoretical and methodological (50s–70s), during which a unified program for the upbringing of preschool children was developed and tested; empirical-theoretical (80s to early 2000s), when the preschool education system experienced a regulatory and legal crisis, which led to a new concept, to renewed target attitudes in this area. Since the beginning of the 2000s, a regulatory and methodological stage has been implemented, in which the legal framework for the implementation of high-quality educational activities in preschool educational organizations is being formed. At the same time, the idea is expressed about the need to develop concepts of a methodological nature for the accumulation of existing and identification of promising directions in the development of preschool pedagogy. The proposed periodization is directly related to the stages of the country’s social and cultural development, reflects the key ideological aspects of the historical stage, emphasizes the features in approaches to the upbringing of preschool children. The presented material does not exhaust the variety of issues related to the study of the theory and practice of preschool education, but reveals another direction for research in this area.