: 27 [1] Kikoin was born in the town of Novye Zhagory (now Žagarė in Lithuania), Russian Empire,[2] in a Lithuanian Jewish family; his parents, Kushel Isaakovich and Bunya Israilevna, were school teachers.

[3][4] During the World War I, his family was relocated from Latvia to Russia where he entered in gymnazium in Pskov, and upon graduation, he went to study physics at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1925.

[3] He taught physics at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, and his early work investigated the electrical conductivity and magnetic attractions in metals until 1938.

: 412 [5] It was Kurchatov who brought Kikoin in Soviet program of nuclear weapons and assigned him the Uranium enrichment project at this Laboratory No.

2 using the gaseous diffusion method took place under Kikoin while Lev Artsimovich worked on electromagnetic isotope separation.