Chetkov was born into a well-off peasant family in Novaya Lyalya, Sverdlovsk Oblast in 1926. In the 1930s his family were forced to give up their land during collectivisation, and for several years he travelled with his parents around various collective farms and factories in the Urals as they looked for work. In 1942, aged 16, Chetkov was arrested for 'hooliganism' and placed in the Gulag system, ending up at the penal colony near Nizhny Tagil, the same one at which Armin Stromberg was interred, at about the same time. In 1944 he was conscripted into a tank regiment in the Russian army and saw action in Latvia during the Courland Pocket blockade at the end of World War II.