[1] He graduated from secondary school[2] and worked in a bootmaker's workshop in Kazan before being conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army during World War I in August 1915.

Imprisoned at the Hammerstein camp, Akhmanov was released after the end of the war in December 1918 and in January 1919 began working as a woodchopper at a bakery in Kazan.

[5] Drafted into the Red Army in July 1919 during the Russian Civil War, Akhmanov was sent to study at the 1st Infantry Command Courses in Kazan.

Demobilized in September 1923, Akhmanov was again conscripted into the Red Army in December of that year and appointed an acting company commander in the 153rd Territorial Rifle Regiment at Balta, Odessa Oblast.

In April 1936 he became commander of the 100th Separate Tank Battalion at Berdichev, then studied as part of a special group at the Red Army Chemical Defense Academy from January 1937.

Akhmanov was transferred to command the 27th Tank Division of the newly formed 17th Mechanized Corps of the Western Special Military District on 1 April 1941.

[5] When Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on 22 June 1941, Akhmanov was on leave in Kaluga, visiting his wife, Mariya Nikolaevna.

With this force Akhmanov escaped encirclement alongside the 36th Tank Division in the area of Rudniki, continuing to collect the remnants of his unit that came in piecemeal.

Continuing east with a remaining group of between 30 and 60 officers and enlisted men, Akhmanov crossed the Svisloch river but ran into a German screening force near Zabichany.

Near Mogilev he joined the group led by Major General Pyotr Akhlyustin, numbering between 1,000 and 1,400 men, and with it broke out of the encirclement on the night of 27 to 28 July, crossing the Sozh River in the sector of the 137th Rifle Division.

For his leadership of the corps, especially in the defeat of the German Budapest relief attempts, Akhmanov received the title Hero of the Soviet Union and was awarded the Order of Lenin on 28 April 1945.

[5][1] Russian historian Mikhail Cherepanov wrote in a 2017 article that Akhmanov's suicide was an attempt to escape being arrested during the then-ongoing purge of Soviet senior officers.