He was associated with Eduard Burdzhalov and Isaak Mints at MSU, and in the late 1940s was one of the historians at the university who was attacked by Arkadiĭ Sidorov as one of what Joseph Stalin described as "rootless cosmopolitans", most of whom were Jewish intellectuals.

His career flourished in the post-Stalin period and in 1960 he won the N. V. Lomonosov Prize of MSU, also receiving a doctorate there in 1965, and publishing a number of books such as the highly cited Rozhdenie sovetskogo gosudarstva 1917-1918 gg (1965) on the birth of the Soviet state.

[3] Gorodetsky worked as a historian for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History [hy; pl; ru; uk] (MIFLI/МИФЛИ) in 1932 and 1933 after the Humanities faculty of MSU was abolished.

He received his doctorate in history from MSU in 1965[2] and wrote three books by 1970 and edited a fourth, including his work on the historiography of the October Revolution, about which he was a leading authority,[9] and his highly cited Rozhdenie sovetskogo gosudarstva 1917-1918 gg on the birth of the Soviet state in 1917-1918 (1965).

Reviewer Rudolf Schlesinger felt that, notwithstanding the central and approving place that the author gave to Lenin, in the book Gorodetsky had taken an undogmatic and fresh approach different from his contemporaries in either the West or the Soviet Union.