Nikolai Nikolaevich Smirnov - Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Professor of St. Petersburg State University. In 2013-2018, he headed the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Specialist in the history of the Great Russian Revolution, Russian foreign policy, domestic intelligentsia. This interview was arranged in October 2021. It was given remotely and then edited by Nikolai Nikolaevich from St. Petersburg in January 2022. The conversation is devoted to the current state of the historiography of the Revolution and the Civil War in Russia. Special attention is paid to the problem of the religious factor in Russia during the Civil War.