December 18 marks 90 years to Yuri Nikulin

Yuri Nikulin was born on December 18, 1921 in Demidov, the Smolensk region. His father, Vladimir Andreevich Nikulin worked in the Drama Theater in Demidov. The actress was his mother, Lidia Ivanovna Nikulina. In 1925, the family moved to Moscow.

On November 8, 1939, he was drafted into the army, served in the 115th anti-aircraft artillery regiment. During the Soviet-Finnish war, the anti-aircraft battery, where he served, was near Sestroretsky and guarded air approaches to Leningrad. In the Great Patriotic War he fought near Leningrad until 1943. In the spring of 1943, he fell ill with inflammation of the lungs and was sent to the Leningrad hospital, and immediately after the discharge was shell -shocked during the air raid on Leningrad. After discharge in August 1943, Nikulin was sent to the 72nd separate anti-aircraft division near Kolpino. He was demobilized in May 1946 with the rank of senior sergeant; During the war he was awarded medals “For Courage”, “For the Defense of Leningrad” and “For Victory over Germany”.

After the war ended, he tried to enter the VGIK and theatrical institutions, where he was not accepted, since the commissions did not find acting in it. In the end, he entered the studio of clowning at the Moscow circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard. Having finished training, he began to work as an assistant with a clown with a pencil. Working with him, Yuri Nikulin met Mikhail Shuidin. Nikulin worked with a pencil for two and a half years, when in 1950 Shuidin and Nikulin left the pencil together and began to work on their own.

Nikulin stopped performing when he was 60 years old, in 1981, and transferred to the post of chief director of the circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard. Since 1982, Nikulin is the director of the circus. With it, a completely new building was built for the circus, the opening of which occurred in 1989.