Yuri Nikulin (18 December 1921 – 21 August 1997) was awarded the title of People's Artist of the USSR in 1973 and Hero of Socialist Labour in 1990. He also received a number of state awards, including the prestigious Order of Lenin, which he received twice in his lifetime. Nikulin was born just after the end of the Russian civil war, in Smolensk in Western Russia. His mother was a garage supervisor and his father a writer of satirical plays – "a profession which may have influenced [Nikulin's] future career". Nikulin fought in the Red Army in the Winter War with Finland and the World War II with Germany. He reportedly had a comparably "long period of military service, from 1939 to 1946, preparing to be demobilised just when the German invasion of the Soviet Union began in 1941."

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