This is a historical review covering the last 30 years of the observational study of lenticular galaxies at the 6m telescope BTA of the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The development of spectroscopic techniques at the BTA has allowed to get comprehensive information about this class of stellar systems, starting from the study of their nuclei in the late 80th towards quite exclusive results obtained in the last years on the outermost parts of their large-scale stellar disks.