Nina Kukharchuk was born to a Ukrainian (more correctly, Lemki) family in a village of Wasylów, which was then part of the Russian Empire, but now in Poland. Her parents, Pyotr Vasilievich Kukharchuk and Yekaterina Petrovna Bondarchuk, were peasants. After completing three years of primary school in her village, in 1912 she enrolled in a school in Lublin, and then in a senior school in Chelm. After the beginning of World War I Kukharchuk relocated to Odessa, where she studied until 1919 and worked as a secretary. In 1919 she joined the Bolsheviks in Odessa. Kukharchuk fluently spoke French, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian as well as her native Lemki dialect and she became one of the leaders of the Young Communist League in Odessa, then occupied by the French. Kukharchuk and Taras Franko, the son of Ivan Franko, then joined the Galician party bureau, created at the order of Vladimir Lenin to spread Communist ideas among the Ukrainian Galician Army. In June 1920 she was appointed as an agitator to the Polish front and became the leader of the education department and of the women's department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. Later that year Kukharchuk was sent to Moscow to continue her studies. In 1921 she became a teacher at a communist party school in Bakhmut, but soon became ill with typhus, and after recovery was moved to a similar school in Donetsk. There in 1922 Kukharchuk met Nikita Khrushchev, with whom she spent most of her remaining life.