Surikov was born on May 26, 1961, in the Moscow region. His father, Viktor Surikov, was the first deputy director of TsNIImash, one of the leading research institutes of the USSR for rocket science and space flight control. In February 1984, Anton Surikov graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI) named after Sergo Ordzhonikidze with a degree in mechanical engineering. In November 1988, he became a candidate of technical sciences (the dissertation was defended at the academic council of military unit No. 73790). A GRU officer, major general.

In the 1990s, Surikov repeatedly visited zones of armed conflict in the Caucasus (in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya). In Abkhazia in 1992, he served under the name Mansur Natkhoev and was responsible for the sabotage work of the Abkhaz separatists, was the deputy head of the military mission, and supervised the training of military specialists for the Abkhaz armed forces. He claimed that he recruited Shamil Basayev as a GRU agent, who a few years later became the Kremlin's most dangerous enemy in the Chechen people's war for independence from Russia.

He was engaged in the supply of weapons to Afghanistan, North Africa and Nagorno-Karabakh, where he contacted the then president of the unrecognized republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, Robert Kocharyan, an old acquaintance of Alexander Prokhanov. In 1997, Kocharyan became the Prime Minister of Armenia, and in 1998 he headed the republic as president. The contacts of GRU agent Prokhanov and the officer of the active reserve of the GRU (as in the FSB, there was an institute of "officers of the active reserve" in the GRU) Surikov with Kocharyan were productive: Russia supplied Armenia with weapons worth $1 billion in 1996.

From the mid-1990s, Surikov began to be published regularly in the Russian press, primarily in pro-communist publications such as "Zavtra" and "Pravda-Five." From September 1996 to 1998, he worked as an assistant to the deputy of the State Duma of the second convocation, the chairman of the State Duma committee on economic policy Yuri Maslyukov, a friend of Surikov's father.

From September 1998, after the appointment of Yevgeny Primakov as Prime Minister of Russia, Surikov became an assistant to the now first deputy chairman of the government of the Russian Federation Maslyukov, who lobbied for the appointment of Anton Surikov first to the post of head of "Rosvooruzhenie," and then to the position of head of the GRU. Both appointments did not take place.

In the same 1998, the company Far West Ltd was registered in Switzerland. Its founders, together with Surikov, were former officers of the Soviet GRU Vladimir Filin (Litovchenko), a citizen of Ukraine living in Switzerland, and an ethnic Chechen Ruslan Saidov, who lived permanently in Istanbul. Far West was an operator and intermediary in the "gray" and "black" arms markets. Branches of the firm were located in Ukraine and Iran.

"Being an officer of the active reserve, he was engaged in many delicate missions – from the removal of secret communication equipment from our embassy in Baghdad during the start of the Iraq war to the supply of Ukrainian missiles to Iran," Prokhanov said about Surikov, referring to the activities of the firm Far West.

After the resignation of the Primakov government in May 1999, Surikov left the government apparatus and took the position of advisor to the general director and general designer of the Russian Aircraft Corporation "MiG" Nikolai Nikitin. From February to April 2000, he was the head of the apparatus of the State Duma committee on industry, construction and high-tech technologies (committee chairman Maslyukov). In May 2001, he made a sensational statement about the supply of drugs by the Russian military from Afghanistan to Tajikistan. In July 2002, Surikov resigned from the civil service.