Leonid

For the meteor shower, see Leonids.

Leonid (Russian: Леони́д [lʲɪɐˈnʲit]; Ukrainian: Леоні́д [leoˈn⁽ʲ⁾id]; Belarusian: Леані́д, romanized: Ljeaníd [lʲɛaˈnʲit]) is a Slavic version of the given name Leonidas. The French version is Léonide.

People with the name include:

• Leonid Andreyev (or Andrejew) (1871–1919), a Russian playwright and short-story writer who led the Expressionist movement in the national literature
• Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982), political leader of the USSR from 1964 to 1982
• Leonid Buryak (b. 1953), USSR/Ukraine-born Olympic-medal-winning soccer player and coach
• Leonid Bykov (1928–1979), a Soviet-Ukrainian actor, film director, and script writer.
• Leonid Desyatnikov (b. 1955), a Russian opera and film composer
• Leonid Gaidai, (1923–1993) a popular Soviet comedy film director and People's Artist of the USSR in 1991
• Leonid Geishtor (b. 1936), USSR (Belarus)-born Olympic champion Canadian pairs 1,000-meter sprint canoer
• Leonid Gobyato (1875–1915), a Russian lieutenant-general and designer of the modern, man-portable mortar
• Leonid Feodorov (1879–1935), a bishop and Exarch for the Russian Catholic Church, and survivor of the GULAG
• Leonid Filatov (1946–2003), a Russian actor, director, poet, and pamphleteer, and People's Artist of Russia in 1996
• Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008), Russian-born American economist and mathematician who shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics
• Leonid Kadeniuk (b. 1951), the first astronaut of independent Ukraine who flew on NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997
• Leonid Kogan (1924-1982), a Soviet/Russian violinist
• Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) a Soviet/Russian mathematician, economist, and only winner from the USSR of the Nobel Prize in Economics (1975)
• Leonid Kolumbet (b. 1937), Soviet-Ukrainian Olympic cyclist medalist
• Leonid Krasin (1870–1926), Soviet/Russian engineer and politician
• Leonid Kravchuk (b. 1934) a Ukrainian politician who was elected the first President of Ukraine in 1991
• Leonid Kuchma (b. 1938), the second President of Ukraine (1994–2005)
• Leonid Kuravlyov (b. 1936) a Russian actor and People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1976
• Leonid Levin (b. 1948), a Soviet-American computer scientist
• Leonid the Magnificent, (Leonid Filatov, b. 1973) a Russian performance artist who became known nationwide after his appearances on America's Got Talent
• Leonid Fyodorovich Myasin/Léonide Massine (1896–1979), Russian choreographer and ballet dancer
• Leonid Mezheritski (1930–2007), USSR and Israeli still-life, portrait and landscape painter
• Leonid Moseyev (b. 1952), Soviet-Russian long-distance runner
• Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945), a Russian Impressionist painter
• Leonid Reiman (or Reyman) (b. 1957), a Russian businessman and government official, currently Minister of Communications and Information Technologies of the Russian Federation
• Leonid Rozhetskin, (b. 1966) an international financier and lawyer credited with bringing significant financial and legal advances to modern Russia
• Leonid Sagayduk (1929–1998), a Soviet swimmer
• Leonid Sobinov (1872–1934), a Russian opera singer and the People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1923
• Leonid Stadnyk (b. 1971), a Ukrainian man named "world's tallest living man" by Guinness World Records 2008
• Leonid Stein (b. 1934) Soviet Grandmaster chess player from Ukraine who was among the world's top ten players in the 1960s
• Leonid Taranenko (b. 1956) 1980 gold medallist in weightlifting for the Soviet Union
• Leonid Teyf, Russian-Israeli businessman
• Leonid Toptunov (18 August 1960 - 14th may 1986) was a Senior engineer at the Chernobyl power plant. Received a deadly amount of radiation after trying to restart the water flow into the reactor 4 after it had exploded. Reactor 4 exploded because the man in charge ordered his workers to follow his instructions instead of following safety procedures for the test.
• Leonid Utyosov (Leyzer (Lazar) Vaysbeyn, or Weissbein) (1895–1982) a Russian jazz singer and comic actor, and People's Artist of the USSR in 1965
• Leonid Voskresenskiy (1913–1965), Soviet rocket engineer and launch director for Sputnik
• Leonid Zhabotinsky (1938–2016), Soviet weightlifter and Olympic gold medalist

Fictional characters include:

• Leonid, the protagonist in Alexander Bogdanov’s 1908 Russian science fiction novel Red Star
• Leonid, the protagonist in the Labyrinth trilogy of cyberpunk novels written in the late 1990s by Russian science fiction writer Sergey Lukyanenko (Labyrinth of Reflections, False Mirrors, and Transparent Stained-Glass Windows).
• Leonid Gorbovsky, a character in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's series of science fiction novels set in the Noon Universe written from the 1960s through the 1980s.
• Leonid Kovar, a Russian superhero also known as Red Star
• Leonid McGill, a Manhattan private detective in fiction written by Walter Mosley
• Leonid Pavel, a Russian nuclear scientist in The Dark Knight Rises

See also

• Leonidas (disambiguation)
• Saint Leonidas, several saintly martyrs
• Alvis Leonides, a British air-cooled radial piston aero-engine