Leonid is a Russian and Ukrainian version of the given name Leonidas.
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 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 (b. 1917), 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 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 the Magnificent, (Leonid Filatov, b. 1973) a Russian performance artist who became known nationwide after his appearances on America's Got Talent
- 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 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
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