[1] After his second year of undergraduate study, Smirnov went in autumn 1941 to the front and served as a radio operator in the Northern Fleet until the end of WW II.
After demobilization in 1945, he continued his studies at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University and began to participate in the seminars of the famous topologist P. S. Alexandrov.
[1] In 1951 he defended his Ph.D. (Russian Candidate of Sciences) thesis О топологических пространствах, компактных в данном отрезке мощностей (On topological spaces, compact in a given interval of cardinalities), which was supervised by P. S.
[2] In 1957 Smirnov received his Russian Doctor of Sciences degree with thesis Исследование по общей и равномерной топологии методом покрытий (Investigation of general and uniform topology by the covering method).
In 1962 he was an Invited Speaker with talk Некоторые вопросы равномерной топологии (Some questions of uniform topology) at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm.