All articles starting with L

Leonid Kravchuk (Леонід Макарович Кравчук)

Leonid Kravchuk (Леонід Макарович Кравчук, 1934–2022), first president of independent Ukraine 1991–1994, former CPU ideology secretary, Supreme Soviet chairman, and signer of the Belavezha Agreement; defeated by Leonid Kuchma in 1994.

Sep 20, 2026

Leonid Kruglyak

Leonid Kruglyak is a human geneticist and genomicist at UCLA, chair of its Human Genetics department, known for genetic mapping methods and pioneering eQTL studies.

Leonid Kuchma (Леонід Данилович Кучма)

Leonid Kuchma (Леонід Данилович Кучма), born 1938, second president of Ukraine 1994–2004 and former missile-plant director; signed the Budapest Memorandum, presided over oligarchic clans, and was implicated by the Kuchmagate tapes in the Gongadze murder.

Leonid Leonov

Leonid Leonov, also known as Leonid Maksimovich Leonov, was a Soviet novelist and playwright born in Moscow whose novel The Russian Forest won the Lenin Prize in 1957.

Leonid Levin

Leonid Anatolievich Levin (Леони́д Анато́льевич Ле́вин) is a Soviet-born American computer scientist at Boston University who independently discovered NP-completeness alongside Stephen Cook and won the 2012 Knuth Prize.

Leonid Levitov

Leonid S. Levitov is a Russian-born theoretical condensed matter physicist and professor of physics at MIT, known for leviton current pulses, graphene valley currents, and electron hydrodynamics.

Leonid Mandelstam

Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam (Леонид Исаакович Мандельштам, 1879–1944) was a Soviet physicist who co-discovered the Raman effect in 1928 and founded the Moscow school of radiophysics and oscillation theory.

Leonid Margolis

Leonid Margolis (Леонид Марголис; born 1948) is a virologist and immunologist who developed ex vivo human lymphoid tissue systems for studying HIV pathogenesis at NIH, later joining Ilia State University.

Leonid Mirny

Leonid Mirny is a biological physicist and MIT professor who models 3D genome folding; his loop extrusion hypothesis, that molecular motors fold DNA, was confirmed experimentally.

Leonid Nikolaev (Леонид Васильевич Николаев)

Leonid Nikolaev, also known as Leonid Vasilevich Nikolaev, was a Soviet Communist Party member who assassinated Sergei Kirov, the party chief of Leningrad, at the Smolny Institute on December 1, 1934.

Leonid Osipov

Leonid Mikhaylovich Osipov (Леонид Михайлович Осипов), Soviet water polo forward, 1943-2020, Moscow; Olympic bronze 1964, silver 1968, gold 1972; two-time European champion 1966 and 1970; 1973 world silver medalist.

Sep 27, 2026

Leonid Pasechnik

Leonid Pasechnik is a Russian politician serving as the Russian-installed head of the Lugansk People's Republic, an occupied territory recognized internationally as part of Ukraine's Luhansk Oblast.

Leonid Radvinsky

Leonid Radvinsky, also known as Leo Radvinsky, was a Ukrainian-born, US-based entrepreneur who became the sole owner of OnlyFans after buying its parent company in 2018.

Leonid Rogozov

Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov (Леони́д Ива́нович Ро́гозов, 1934–2000), Soviet surgeon of the Sixth Antarctic Expedition who removed his own appendix at Novolazarevskaya Station on 1 May 1961, the first solo wilderness auto-appendectomy.

Leonid Rudin

Leonid (Lenny) Rudin is an American computer scientist, co-author of the landmark 1992 Rudin–Osher–Fatemi total-variation denoising paper and co-founder and CEO of Cognitech, a Santa Monica forensic video analysis firm.

Leonid Sazanov

Leonid A. Sazanov, born in 1960, is a British structural biologist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria known for the first atomic structures of respiratory complex I.

Leonid Shcherbakov

Leonid Shcherbakov (Леонид Михайлович Щербаков, 1927–2004), Soviet triple jumper: Olympic silver 1952, European champion 1950 and 1954, world record 16.23 m in 1953, personal best 16.46 m, later coach of Pedro Pérez.

Sep 27, 2026

Leonid Slutsky (Russian politician)

Leonid Slutsky is a Russian politician who has chaired the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia since 2022 and leads its faction in the State Duma, succeeding Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Leonid Spirin

Leonid Spirin (Леонид Васильевич Спирин, 1932–1982), Soviet race walker for Metalurg Moskva; first Olympic 20 km walk champion (Melbourne 1956, 1:31:27.4) in the only walking medal sweep, with 15 and 20 km world records.

Leonid Taranenko

Leonid Taranenko, born 1956 in Belarus, is a weightlifter who won Olympic gold for the Soviet Union in 1980 and silver for the Unified Team in 1992.

Leonid Telyatnikov (Леонид Петрович Телятников)

Leonid Petrovich Telyatnikov (Леонід Петрович Телятніков, 1951–2004), Soviet-Ukrainian firefighter, chief of Chernobyl NPP fire unit VPCh-2, commanded the 26 April 1986 Unit 4 firefighting, took a 520 rem dose, Hero of the Soviet Union 1986.

Leonid Toptunov (Леонід Федорович Топтунов)

Leonid Toptunov (Леонід Федорович Топтунов; 1960–1986) was a Soviet nuclear engineer, the senior reactor control engineer at Chernobyl during the 1986 accident, and died of acute radiation syndrome at 25.

Leonid Vaserstein

Leonid Vaserstein is a Russian-born mathematician, emeritus professor at Penn State, known for the stable rank of rings and the Wasserstein distance used in machine learning.

Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich

Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich (Леонид Витальевич Канторович, 1912–1986) was a Soviet mathematician and economist who founded linear programming and shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Leonid Volkov

Leonid Ivanovich Volkov (Леонид Иванович Волков), Soviet ice hockey forward (1934–1995), 1964 Innsbruck Olympic gold medalist, World and European champion 1964–1965, seven-time USSR champion with CSKA Moskva; distinct from the politician Leonid Volkov born 1980.

Leonid Voloshin

Leonid Voloshin (Леонид Анатольевич Волошин), born 1966, Russian long and triple jumper; 1988 and 1992 Olympian, world silver medalist 1991 and 1993, 1990 European champion, 17.77 m world indoor record (1994).

Leonid Zhabotinsky

Leonid Ivanovych Zhabotinsky (Леонід Іванович Жаботинський), Soviet heavyweight weightlifter born in Ukraine, two-time Olympic champion (Tokyo 1964, Mexico City 1968, +90 kg, 572.5 kg each), who dethroned Yury Vlasov and set 19 world records between 1963 and 1974.