Porechenkov was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the Russian SSR on 2 March 1969, to parents Evgeny Mikhailovich Porechenkov and Galina Nikolayevna Porechenkova. His father was a Soviet Navy officer, and his mother was a building engineer. Since his parents were busy at work, he, in gereral, was reared until the age of 5 by his grandmother in a village of Pskov Oblast, and then, before going to school, he was returned in Leningrad. In the late 1970s, his father was appointed as an inspector of the Polish Gdansk Shipyard, where Soviet ships were built, thus, in the first years of schooling, Porechenkov had to leave Leningrad and move, along with the family, to the Polish People's Republic. There, he began to study in a Soviet embassy boarding school in Warsaw. During the education period, he became interested in sports, especially boxing. After graduating from the school in 1986, he went to the Estonian SSR, where he entered the Tallinn Higher Military-Political Construction College to earn a political officer degree. Despite sporting achievements-Porechenkov earned the rank of the Candidate for Master of Sport in Boxing after his successful performance at the college championship and municipal tournament in Tallinn, he was dismissed from the college in 1990, just 10 days before his gradiation. When he returned home from Estonia, he worked in a picture framing studio, and attended Armen Dzhigarkhanyan's class in the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), which he had not graduated from. In 1991 he entered the Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography (LGITMiK), Veniamin Filshtinsky's class, and graduated in 1996.