Leonid (Russian: Леони́д) 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
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 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 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 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 Pavel, a Russian nuclear scientist in The Dark Knight Rises