The article attempts to examine the perception of the Civil War in Russia by the students of St. Petersburg University (SPbSU) aged from 18 to 22 years. Respondents were asked to answer a number of open-ended, semi-open-ended, and closed-ended questions concerning the main characteristics of the Civil War as a historical phenomenon, the causes of its emergence, its features, consequences, participants, and the perpetuation of memory about it. It was found out that the main sources of information about the Civil War in Russia for Russian students at the moment are textbooks and multimedia.
The study revealed a serious differentiation of opinions. When it comes to questions about the cause of the Civil War, the responsibility of its participants, and the perpetuation of the memory of its participants, balanced and restrained opinions dominate. At the same time, in the area of personal attitudes to the parties to the conflict, extremely contradictory opinions are observed. Neutral answers predominate in describing the historical personalities, which can speak both about a balanced approach to assessing the leaders and about a low interest in them. However, some of the personalities received very polar assessments. We may assume that this situation is a consequence of the contradictory attitude towards the Civil War in Russian society as a whole, which in turn is transmitted to young people. The results of the survey allow us to talk about the lack of a holistic understanding of the processes of those years by students, which in turn especially emphasizes the need to develop new ways of popularizing historical knowledge through various kinds of multimedia, to look for new channels of information transmission, as well as to pay special attention to the modernization of the school program in the field of history.