Born in Voronezh, Nikolaev trained at the Moscow State Technical University under Viktor Vesnin and Aleksandr Kuznetsov, graduating in 1925.

In 1929 Nikolaev won a public contest for the Communal House of the Textile Institute - a modern campus for 2000 students.

[1] Constrained by cost and space limits, Nikolaev produced the most radical example of a communal house, where student life was subject to nearly military regulations.

His ideas of reducing private living space to nothing but a sleeping cubicle without windows (the students had to keep all their earthly possessions in a separate locker room and were not allowed to enter the cubicles at daytime) was too radical even for 1920s Soviet avant-garde, so Nikolaev had to change the plans to allow marginally more breathing space to the residents.

Eventually, Nikolaev completely dedicated himself to education, and held the chair of the director of Moscow Architectural Institute from 1958 to 1970.