Dmitri Shepilov was born in Askhabad in (current capital of Turkmenistan) the Transcaspian Oblast of the Russian Empire in a working-class family of Russian ethnicity. He graduated from the Law School of the Moscow State University in 1926 and was sent to work in Yakutsk, where he worked as a deputy prosecutor and acting prosecutor for Yakutia. In 1928–1929 Shepilov worked as an assistant regional prosecutor in Smolensk. In 1931–1933 Shepilov studied at the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow while simultaneously working as the "responsible secretary" of the magazine "On the Agrarian Front". After graduating in 1933, Shepilov was made head of the political department of a sovkhoz. In 1935 he was made Deputy Chief of the Sector of Agricultural Science of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.