[3][4][5] Oleg Sokolov was born on 9 July 1956 in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg), Russian SFSR, Soviet Union.

In 1991, under the supervision of Professor Vladimir Revunenkov [ru], a Doctor of Historical Sciences, he defended his dissertation at St. Petersburg State University for the degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences on the topic of The Officer Corps of the French Army Under the Ancien Régime and During the Revolution of 1789–1799 (speciality 07.00.03 – general history).

He translated into Russian and supplemented with extensive commentary Memoirs of the Napoleonic Wars 1802–1815 (French: Souvenirs militaires d'Octave Levavasseur : officer d'artillerie, aide de camp du Maréchal Ney (1802–1815)) by French officer Octave Levavasseur, who took part in all military campaigns (except for the Russian campaign of 1812) by Napoleon Bonaparte.

On 9 November 2019, Sokolov was detained on suspicion of the murder of Anastasia Yeshchenko [uk], his 24-year-old lover, his graduate student at St. Petersburg State University and his co-author of scholarly works.

[12][13][14] On 11 November, Sokolov was charged with wilful murder (article 105 of the Criminal Code)[15] and was arrested for two months until 8 January 2020 with the detention in the Kresty Prison.

[16][17][18] On 13 November, his defense lawyer said that Sokolov had given full testimony on the case (he had previously refused to do so, referring to the 51st article[a] of the Constitution of the Russian Federation).

[25] As Sokolov himself stated during a meeting of the Oktyabrsky District Court of St. Petersburg, the crime was committed on the basis of a personal conflict, because, according to him, Yeshchenko had “recently a terrible reaction to my children” and “she started to freak at their mention” and then they both “lost control” during a quarrel and then “she attacked me with a knife”.

In 2018, the Moskovskij Komsomolets newspaper published an article in which Sokolov's student accused the lecturer of brutal beating in 2008.

[32] French Institute of Social Science, Economics and Politics [fr] (ISSEP), founded by Marion Maréchal, the niece of Marine Le Pen, had removed him from his position on its scientific committee on Saturday (9 November).