Suckachev attended Imperial Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg, where he studied under Gavriil Ivanovich Tanfilyev and Vasily Dokuchaev.

In 1919 Sukachev founded the Department of Dendrology and Systematics of Plants at the Imperial Forestry Institute, which he chaired until 1941.

From 1941 to 1943, he managed the Department of the Biological Sciences at the Ural Forestry Institute, in Sverdlovsk.

In 1944, Sukachev organized the Forestry Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Forest and Wood of Siberian Department of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Krasnoyarsk), which he led up to 1959.

The Sukachev Institute of Forestry, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, is named after him.