Ivan Kulbertinov

Kulbertinov was born on 7 November, 1917 in Tyanya in the present-day Sakha Republic to an Evenk family of reindeer herders, who hunted wildlife in the taiga of Olyokminsky District. His father Nikolai Romanovich Kulbertinov died when he was ten and his mother Anna Vasilievna was often sick due to chronic illness. For most of his teenage years, Kulbertinov worked on the Novaya Zhizn collective farm in Tsivilsky District, Chuvash Republic, for which he was recognised as a Stakhanovite. His older brother Nikolai was killed while serving on the Eastern Front in 1939.

Kulbertinov was drafted into the Red Army on 12 June 1942. Measured as 153 cm and 53 kg, he underwent training in the Ural Mountains and deployed as part of the 2nd Guards Airborne Division on 27 February 1943 near Staraya Russa, where he made his first confirmed kill. Between 1942 and 1945, Kulbertinov served outside of Moscow, Oryol, and Kursk in western Russia, in Kiev and Vinnitsa in western and eastern Ukraine, as well as in Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia. His high-ranking kills included a Sturmbannführer and two Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer. During the war, Kulbertinov trained around 35 junior snipers.

Wehrmacht troops in Mukachevo nicknamed him "Kulbert" while those in the Eastern Carpathians referred to Kulbertinov by the epithets "Siberian Midnight"( German: Sibirische Mitternacht) or "Siberian Owl" (German: Sibirische Eule). In the community of his home, he was given the honorific name "buskhaa", meaning "mighty" in the Evenki language.