A graduate of the North Caucasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, Mamsurov has also obtained a degree in history from the Academy of Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He made his career in the Komsomol, "Communist Union of Youth", in the 1970s and advanced through the ranks of the CPSU in the 1980s. He was elected a deputy chairman of the Supreme Council of the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania in 1994 and was then put in charge of the administration of the republic's Pravoberezhny district in 1995. He chaired the North Ossetian government from February 1998 to October 2000 and the republic's parliament from October 19, 2000 until June 7, 2005, when he was approved, at the initiative of the then-President of Russia Vladimir Putin, as the Head of the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania. Mamsurov has been allied with Putin and holds a position in the United Russia party's Supreme Council as well as in the Presidium of Russia's State Council.