Raphael Soyer and his identical twin brother, Moses, were born in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of Russia in 1899.
After graduating from the Alexander High School in Borisoglebsk in 1918 he entered the Petrovsko-Razumovskaya Agricultural University in Moscow, but volunteered in the Red Army, and at the end of the year, as a cadet of the First Artillery School, participated in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.