Arkady Sidorov was born in Pochinki, Lukoyanovsky district, Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod province, on 27 January (8 February) 1900.

He acquired his doctorate in history from MSU in 1943 for a thesis titled "The Russian Economy during the First World War of 1914–1917".

He was a professor at Moscow State Institute of International Relations from 1945 to 1949 and worked at the Bolshevik party school from 1946.

[1] In 1947, Sidorov wrote a column for the Bolshevik newspaper Культура и жизнь (Culture and Life) attacking the lectures of the Jewish MSU professor and academician Isaak Mints who, at that time, was a dominant figure in the teaching of Soviet history.

Sidorov's attack on Mints coincided with Joseph Stalin's thinly-veiled anti-Semitic campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitans" who were characterised as lacking in patriotism, holding ideologically incorrect views, and not ethnically Russian.

[4] Sidorov's research was into the history of capitalism in Russia which he concluded had developed largely independently of the rest of Europe without the help of foreign investment.

[1] He received an obituary from his former student, Pavel Volobuev,[8] in Istoriia SSSR, a journal of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.