Nina Aleksandrovna was born on 17 July 1924 in Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Union. She was the granddaughter of the Archpriest of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ at Tarusa, Nikolai Uspensky, () and his wife Nadezhda Danilovna Yakhontova (), whose children became intellectuals and musicians. She graduated from music school in the same year that the German invasion of Russia occurred. She studied piano, before studying architecture at the Moscow Institute of Architecture under the tutelage of , graduating in 1950.