Born into a peasant family in the Don Cossack Host, Nechitailo was a much-decorated artist celebrated for his portraits of collective farm workers. He received numerous state commissions to travel to all corners of the Soviet Union to paint collective farms and the workers on them, even visiting China and Europe. In the early 1960s he and his wife, the artist Maria Savchenkova, were living in the Krasnodar region, not far from where Nechitailo grew up, where they spent time at the Rossiya collective farm.