His father (Boris Stechkin) was a Soviet turbojet engine designer, academician.
He was turned down, likely due to the fact that the Soviet regime viewed his father as a political dissident at the time.
Stechkin received his PhD in 1948 with a dissertation titled "On the order of best approximations of continuous functions".
Later this department became the Institute of Mechanics and Mathematics at the Ural branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
[1] Stechkin served as professor of mathematics at Moscow State University and his honors include the Chebyshev Award of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1993.