The article discusses the issue of creating a fourth teacher’s institute in Western Siberia. The conditions in which the process of formation and then the activities of this educational institution took place were extremely difficult: two revolutions in 1917, the transfer of power from the Provisional Government first to the Soviet government created considerable difficulties in organizing the educational process. It should also be taken into account that in 1918 the Soviet government was developing a new, more effective model of the public education system. These experiments covered not only primary and secondary schools, but also higher schools. The opening of a new educational institution, essentially a secondary specialized one, required the presence of highly qualified teaching staff with work experience. The city of Novo-Nikolaevsk, which belonged to the group of largest cities in Western Siberia, was second in number of inhabitants only to Omsk and Tomsk. But the named cities already had their own higher educational institutions in which people with higher education worked. To a certain extent, Novo-Nikolaevsk was helped in resolving the personnel issue by the Civil War that began in the spring of 1918, which led to large-scale population movements within the country. Among the people evacuated from the European part of the country and from the Urals were people with higher education who became part of the teaching staff of the local teachers’ institute. In general, the events of the Civil War greatly complicated the activities of the institute and negatively affected the life and work of its staff. It should also be taken into account that during the reign of the Kolchak government, not only students, but also some teachers of the institute were mobilized into the ranks of the White Army. Despite the fact that the Novo-Nikolaev Teachers’ Institute existed for a very short period of time – about three years, it managed to prepare within its walls the first and only graduating class of its students by the summer of 1920. The article also lists the city educational institutions in which teachers continued their activities after the closure of the teacher’s institute.