His mother was Arfenik Adelkhanova (1905–1950), an Armenian genocide survivor, whose family managed to flee from the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and settle in Tbilisi, and who later was involved in local politics.
[citation needed] He was raised first by his grandfather, Shimon Steinberg, and after 1955 by his maternal aunt, Dekhtsanik Adelkhanova, who adopted two of her nephews and changed their names.
[citation needed] In 1969, Adelkhanov graduated from the philological faculty of Tbilisi State University, and started to work as an English translator.
[1] In the early 1970s he became a distributor of Samizdat[1] in Tbilisi, including the works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandelstam[citation needed].
[1] He played an active role in the struggle for the human rights of Meskhetian Turks and other ethnic minorities in Georgia[citation needed].