Leonid Sharayev

Sharayev was born on 12 April 1935 in the village of Chervonyi Maiak [uk], which was then part of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union.^[1] After graduating from the Nikolaev Shipbuilding Institute, he worked at the Black Sea Shipyard in Mykolaiv initially as an assistant foreman then a foreman.^[1] He eventually became the secretary of the Komsomol committee for the plant.^[1]

In 1960, he started taking on higher political positions within the Ukrainian SSR.^[1] He first became second secretary of the regional Komsomol branch for Mykolaiv Oblast, eventually rising to the rank of first secretary.^[1] In October 1980, he was appointed First Secretary of the Mykolaiv Oblast Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, which he did until May 1990.^[1] During this time, he was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet for its 11th convocation (1984-1989) from the Voznesensk territorial district.^[1] During his tenure, he built the first trolleybus lines and multiple pedagogical universities, and a main focus of his tenure was agriculture and shipbuilding.^[1] In 1990, he became First Deputy Head of the Secretariat of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, which he did until the collapse of the Soviet Union.^[1]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became deputy chairman of the Mykolaiv Zemlyachestvo - a regional association for those from Mykolaiv - in the city of Kyiv which he did until 2010.^[1] In his later years in Kyiv, he emphasized unity and stated that the main focus needed to be defending territorial integrity.^[1] In later interviews, he commentated on Soviet history, saying that the Holodomor was not a genocide while simultaneously acknowledging Soviet-era tragedies and was critical of Ukraine's deindustrialization.^[3]