This article examines the challenges of visualizing Russian history courses in contemporary higher education, using illustrations from recent textbooks as case studies. The study explores the peculiarities of employing visual sources, addressing issues of their selection, attribution, and pedagogical application. It analyzes the specific approaches to visualizing different periods of Russian history and investigates methodologies for extracting information from visual texts in educational materials, including techniques for conducting external and internal primary sources criticism. The author employs historical-genetic and comparative analysis to examine the visual materials of various Russian history textbooks. The study identifies shortcomings in current strategies for visualizing historical knowledge and proposes solutions to address them. The author concludes that a strategy of using visual imagery - one far removed from genuine scholarly historical methodology - has migrated from secondary to higher education. Meanwhile, the achievements of the ‘visual turn’ in humanities scholarship over recent decades continue to be largely ignored by university-level history teachers. The images should be treated as a distinct category of historical sources requiring both standard historiographical methods as well as specialized cultural analysis that should be demonstrated to students to develop a more complete and profound understanding of historical periods.