The son of a peasant fisherman, Prokofiev was born in the Lake Ladoga village of Kobona in the Russian Empire (now in northwestern Leningrad Oblast) in 1900.
[1] Having graduated from a local school in 1913, spending the next four years as a teenage student of a teachers' academy in the Imperial capital of St. Petersburg.
Prokofiev joined Bolshevik Party in 1919, during Russian Civil War, and came into the Red Army the same year, remaining in the Soviet Union's military ranks until 1930.
Prokofiev rejoined the Soviet Army as a war correspondent during the Soviet-Finnish War and World War II, in which he witnessed the Germans' Siege of Leningrad, subsequently becoming an influential figure of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Soviet Writers in the post-war period, heading the Leningrad Writers' Union in 1945-1948 and 1955-1965.
[2] Prokofiev's 1944 patriotic poem "Rossiya" ("Россия") was recognized with the Stalin Prize of 1946.