His father Ivan Yakovlevich (1869–1935) was a high-ranking army official serving at the State Military control office, who counted Mikhail Lomonosov among his distant relatives.

His mother Yevgenia Ioannovna Pekar (1872–1954), a daughter of Alexander II's lady-in-waiting, was of Austrian origins; she married (but soon divorced) an Italian man, and it was the latter's musical talents that were considered to be inherited by his grandson who by the age of four played well the accordion even if having obvious difficulties holding it.

At the age of twelve, he joined the piano class of the Conservatory Professor Anna Yesipova, whose list of pupils included Sergei Prokofiev.

[2] In March 1918, invited personally by Vladimir Lenin to join the military apparatus of the new Bolshevik government, Ivan Fomin came to Moscow and soon moved his family to a five-room-flat by Chistye Prudy.

[2] In 1921 Fomin returned to Moscow and wrote the music for the operetta Career of Pirpoint Black, with lyrics by Konstantin Podrevsky and Alexey Fayko.

A year later Alexander Vertinsky recorded it in Paris; he included the song into his standard repertoire, and continued to perform it throughout his career, albeit making various changes to the lyrics.

Among other successful numbers Fomin penned in mid-1920s were "Ei, drug-gitara" (Hey, My Friend Guitar), "Tvoi glaza zelyonye" (Your Green Eyes), as well as "Tolko raz" (Only Once), the latter dedicated to the former Gypsy band singer Maria Masalskaya, then his mother-in-law.

[4] Rumour had it, Stalin admired his song "Sasha" (with lyrics by Pavel German), as performed by Izabella Yurieva, although his biographers doubt that would have been good enough reason for the Soviet leader to personally intervene: They consider the release to be the combined result of the Fomin's poor health and the 'technical' reason that at least some of his accusers and investigators having themselves been arrested and prosecuted, a situation not unusual at the height of the Great Purge.

[2] Two of the songs he wrote in the late 1930s later became famous: "Izumrud" (Emerald) and "Ne govori mne etikh slov nebrezhnykh" ("Don't tell me these sloppy words").

Supported by the Interior ministry, he organized the Yastrebok (Young Hawk) theatre – which for almost a year remained the only functioning one in the Soviet capital – and performed regularly for the frontline Red Army fighters.

In the post-Stalinist Soviet Union some of them were revived (notably, by Nani Bregvadze, who performed and recorded "Dorogoi dlinnoyu" in 1967), but invariably as 'folk songs', their author uncredited.