The author analyzes the reasons for the hard return of Nikolay Matorin (1898–1936) creative works to Russian historiography of the post-Soviet period. She sees them not only in the withdrawal of Matorin’s works from libraries in the Stalin era, but also in the opinion of the modern academic community that he was only a “provincial propagandist of atheism”, a party nominee who was not engaged in research, who completely denied expeditionary collecting work, who sought to destroy ethnography and the science of religion, replacing it with a struggle with religious remnants. This opinion arose under the influence of some early post-Soviet publications, which appeared on the wave of an understandable desire to update Russian ethnography and this desire caused the denying of the right of Marxism to exist as a theoretical basis for research. The article is accompanied by the publication of three letters to the daughter of N. Matorin, written in the mid-1960s, shedding light on the appearance of the first publications about him.