Nina Kukharchuk was born in a Ukrainian family in a village of Wasylów, which was then part of the Russian Empire. 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 to a school in Lublin, and then in Odessa, where she studied until 1919 and worked as a secretary. In early 1920 she joined the bolsheviks and was appointed as an agitator to the Polish front. Later that year she 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 she met Nikita Khrushchev, with whom she spent most of her remaining life. In 1926 Kukharchuk was again sent to Moscow, to study political economy, and after that taught at a party school in Kiev. In Kiev in 1929 she gave birth to Rada, her first child with Khrushchev. She also took care of two children of Khrushchev from his previous marriage, and when in 1930 Khrushchev was sent to Moscow, she followed him there. In Moscow, she lived together with Khrushchev's parents and worked as a party leader at a lamp factory. In 1935 she gave birth to the son Sergei and in 1937 to their daughter Elena, who died aged 35 due to poor health. In 1938 Khrushchev was appointed as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and his family returned to Kiev, but only three years later it was evacuated to Samara due to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. After Khrushchev became the Soviet leader in 1953, Kukharchuk acted as the First Lady of Soviet Union, in a position that was non-existent with previous Soviet leaders. In contrast to her predecessors she accompanied Khrushchev in his foreign trips, took part in official events, and was de facto manager of Khrushchev's private life. She could communicate in five languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, French and English, which she studied for many years in various Communist Party schools. Kukharchuk and Khrushchev officially married only in 1965, after Khrushchev was retired from office. She spent the rest of her life in Zhukovka in Moscow Oblast. She died on 13 August 1984 at the age of 84.
