Early Life[]
Nikolai Semyonovich Patolichev was born in 1908 in Zolino in Vladimir Governorate (now Nizhny Novgorod Oblast) in a peasant family of Russian ethnicity, the son of a Red Army hero in the Russian Civil War, and was orphaned at the age of twelve. After working in factories, he became a Komsomol activist. From an early age, Joseph Stalin had taken an interest in Patolichev. Nikolai's father, Semyon Patolichev, had been a good friend of Stalin's before he was killed in the Polish-Soviet War in 1920. Nikolai Patolichev joined the Communist Party in 1928 in the city of Dzerzhinsk as a Komsomol.