His parents split after his birth, and his mother was exiled for seven years in a sensational court case to Siberia for bigamy; in 1898 commuted into one-year prison.

He graduated from the First Moscow gymnasium in 1901 and left for Paris, where he attended lectures at the Russian Higher School of Social Sciences.

In 1903 he began to study Philology and Philosophy in Moscow, and joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Sukhanov became a contributor to Russkoe Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth) and published (legally) two books on agricultural reform.

Sukhanov remarried Galina Flaksermann) Following his release early March, and having benefited of the amnesty during the festivities of Romanov Tercentenary, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he became an editor of the radical journal Sovremennik (Contemporary) and Letopis (Chronicle).

[2] During the February Revolution in 1917 Sukhanov was one of the founding members of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet.

While working at the Agrarian Institute of the Communist Academy, he opposed Stalin's extreme measures concerning the collectivization and industrialization.

His memoirs display his disdain for the liberals and their socialist allies alike in the Provisional Government and for the Bolsheviks.

In 1955 a one-volume abridged version was published in English under the title The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record by N. N Sukhanov, edited by Joel Carmichael.