* 1925 – Laboratory of crystallography at the Mineralogical Museum (Leningrad).
* 1932 – Crystallographic section of the Lomonosov Institute of Geochemistry, Mineralogy and Petrography of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
* 1937 – Crystallographic Laboratory becomes part of the Geological Group of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
* 1941 – During World War II the majority of academic institutes were evacuated from Moscow to the East. The Crystallographic Laboratory continued its work in 1941-43 in the Sverdlovsk Oblast (in the Urals) where a series of important scientific and applied crystallographic problems were solved.
* 1943 – The Laboratory returns to Moscow and is transferred to the Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and renamed the Institute of Crystallography.
* 1944 – Organization of the Institute of Crystallography. Alexei Shubnikov was appointed Director of the Institute.
* 1956 – Founding of the journal Kristallografiya in which most of the institutes research is subsequently published. This journal is available in English translation as Soviet Physics Crystallography (ISSN 0038-5638) 1956-1992 (vols. 1-37) continued as Crystallography Reports' (ISSN 1063-7745) 1993- (vol. 38-)
* 1957 – Recognition outside the USSR of the establishment of the new field of antisymmetry and colour symmetry by A.V. Shubnikov and N.V. Belov
* 1962 – Boris Konstantinovich Weinstein is appointed Director of the Institute.
* 1969 – Award of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
* 1998 – Professor Mikhail Kovalchuk elected Director of the Institute.
* 2016 – The Institute was subsumed within the new «Crystallography and Photonics» Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (KiF RAS) which is now known as the «Crystallography and Photonics» FLNIK.