Basil Nikitin was born in Sosnowiec, a town in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire.
After graduation from high school in 1904, Nikitin traveled to Russia, where he enrolled at the Lazarev Institute to learn Persian and Turkish.
Here he studied the agrarian question noting that landlords collected both state taxes and exacted a rent whose magnitude varied according to their greed.
Nikitin promised that after the First World War the Assyrians would be offered national community land in Russia.
When the October Revolution broke out and the Russian monarchy was abolished, Nikitin decided against returning to Russia, and emigrated instead to France.
[1] The time spend in the Middle East had endowed Nikitin with a deep insight into the Kurdish problem.