Alexey Arkhipovich was born in a small village called Listvyanka, which was in the Tisulsky District of the Western Siberian Territory (now the Kemerovo Region), in 1934 on May 30. His father, Arkhip Alekseevich, born in 1892, was an ordinary peasant, and his mother, Evdokia Minayevna, devoted her whole life to teaching.
When Alex was three years old, together with his mother he settled in Kemerovo, where after the Civil War his father also came. As you know, Lesha was the 8th child in the family, who willingly went to school in 1943. However, he did not manage to finish the Kemerovo educational institution due to the fact that together with his family he was forced to leave for Kaliningrad (then Koenigsberg), where his father worked.
Exactly ten years later Alexey Arkhipovich graduated from Kaliningrad secondary school, after which he was issued a certificate of education. According to Leonov himself, he was never particularly proud of those good grades that were put in this graduation document, since most of all he valued his knowledge of art and aviation.Lyubov's love of aircraft engines and the construction of flying machines was awakened by Alexei in his early youth, when he watched as his older brother, an aviation technician by profession, was pleased to repair all sorts of details. Together with sports achievements, interest in aircraft pushed Leonov to enter the school of pilots, which was in central Ukraine, namely in the city of Kremenchug. However, Alexei Arkhipovich did not stop there, and in the period from 1955 to 1957 he graduated as a fighter pilot, after which he began to fly in combat regiments.
Thanks to his perseverance, knowledge and physical training in 1960, having passed a complex selective contest, Leonov was enlisted in the first famous cosmonaut detachment of the Soviet Union. After three-year training, on the night of March 18-19, 1965, Alexei Arkhipovich, together with Pavel Belyaev, for the first time made a spacewalk on the ship "Voskhod-2", where he displayed exceptional courage and courage. After this experience, Leonov became a deputy detachment of Soviet cosmonauts, and in the period from 1967 to 1970 took over the command over a group of specialists working on the lunar program.
The great pilot-cosmonaut - Leonov Alexey Arkhipovich for all his professional activities was awarded the Orders of Lenin and the Red Star. In addition, he was repeatedly awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, Hero of Socialist Labor of Bulgaria and the Republic of Vietnam, and he became the owner of many other medals and orders from other countries.
Today Alexei Arkhipovich works and lives in Moscow with his beloved wife Svetlana Pavlovna, from whom he had two daughters, Victoria and Oksana, born in 1961 and 1967.