With his college diploma, Smirnov continued to be promoted. Meanwhile, he worked his way up from the shop floor to be an assistant director of one of the shops of the Novaia Kakhovska Machine-Building Factory. Once back from the military, Smirnov also continued the correspondence courses he had begun in the early 1960s, receiving a degree from the Zaporizhzhia Machine-Building Institute in 1974. In 1963, Smirnov joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and served as a Komsomol organizer ( komsorg) after returning to civilian life. He met and married a young engineer named Zhannetta Nikolaevna Lotnik in the early 1960s and served in the Soviet Army from 1963 to 1966 as a Second Lieutenant. Smirnov displayed a great enthusiasm for Soviet life, pursuing higher education in the evenings and weekends after work and participating in a number of athletic and cultural activities. Soon, however, he moved back to Ukraine to work on the construction of a new hydroelectric power station in the town of Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson Oblast. In 1959, Igor Smirnov began work at the Zlatoust Metallurgical Factory at the age of eighteen. The Smirnov family was reunited in central Russia near the Ural Mountains, where Nikolai Stepanovich directed a primary school and Zinaida Grigor'evna worked as the editor of a local Komsomol newspaper. In the wake of Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, Nikolai Stepanovich was released together with many Soviet inmates. As the family of an enemy of the people, life was difficult for Zinaida Grigor'evna and her three sons, Vladimir, Oleg, and Igor. He was sentenced to fifteen years in the Soviet forced labor camps with a following period of five years' internal exile. However, in the summer of 1952, Nikolai Stepanovich was arrested for irregularities in supply distribution among the Raion's collective farms. The Smirnovs initially benefited from Nikolai Stepanovich's successes-he reached the position of First Secretary of the Golopristanskiy Raion (district) committee in Soviet Ukraine. As the Party promoted Nikolai Stepanovich to ever more important positions, the family moved from Petropavlosk to the Ukrainian SSR, where the Red Army had recently expelled the Nazi German military.

He was the son of Nikolai Stepanovich Smirnov, a worker within the Soviet Communist Party apparatus and Zinaida Grigor'evna Smirnova, a journalist and newspaper editor. Igor Smirnov was born in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union during World War II.

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