Chairman of the Higher Council of Workers' Self-Government Party (PST), State Duma Deputy
Svyatoslav Fyodorov was born on August 8, 1927 in the town of Proskurovo (now Khmelnitsky) in the Ukraine in the family of a Red Army division commander. His nationality is Russian. His father was purged in 1938 and sentenced to 17 years in a prison camp.
After graduating from high school in 1943 he was admitted to the Preparatory Aviation School in Yerevan. He was, however, unable to finish the school because he lost his foot in an accident in 1945. He graduated from the Medical Institute in Rostov-on-Don in 1952.
He defended his Candidate's Dissertation in 1958 and his Doctoral Dissertation in 1967.
He worked as a doctor in the village of Veshenskaya, Rostov Region, and in the town of Lysva, Sverdlovsk Region. He completed a post-graduate course at the Rostov-on-Don Medical Institute in 1957. Since 1958 he worked as the head of the clinical department at the Cheboksary Branch of the State Institute of Eye Diseases named after Helmholz. In 1960 he developed an artificial crystalline lens and carried out the first-ever operation to implant an artificial lens. Fyodorov was dismissed from his job over a conflict with the director of the Branch and his studies were declared to be unscientific. He was reinstated in his job following the publication of an article by A. Agranovsky in the newspaper Izvestia. In 1961-1967 he worked in Archangelsk as head of the Eye Disease Chair at the Medical Institute.
In 1967 he was transferred to Moscow and appointed the head of the Chair of Eye Diseases and the Laboratory for the Implantation of Artificial Lenses at the 3rd Moscow Medical Institute. In 1969 he started research into the implantation of artificial cornea. In 1973 for the first time in the world he developed and carried out an operation to treat glaucoma at an early stage (the method of scleroplastics which subsequently gained international recognition).
In 1974 Fyodorov's laboratory branched out from the Institute as the Research Laboratory of Experimental and Clinical Eye Surgery under the RSFSR Ministry of Health. That same year Fyodorov started carrying out operations to treat and correct myopia by controlled cuts of the cornea according to the method he developed. The method has subsequently been widely used in Fyodorov's clinics and its branches as well as abroad, although it had its critics and is not universally recognized in the medical community, partly because Fyodorov has refused to provide statistical data on remote consequences of the operation. Nevertheless, more than 3 million such operations have been carried out in the world.
In 1979 Fyodorov was appointed the director of the Eye Microsurgery Institute set up in succession to the Laboratory. As director he introduced a number of innovations such as a medical Surgical Conveyor (with the operation conducted by several surgeons each doing a certain part of it, with the main operation carried out by the most experienced surgeon), mobile operation theaters on wheels, etc.
Fydorov's clinic continued to develop in the perestroika era. Under a decree of Nikolai Ryzhkov's government in April 1986 the Institute was transformed into the Inter-Sectoral Scientific-Technical Complex "Eye Microsurgery", or MNTK. The MNTK was granted a degree of discretion unprecedented for the time. It had its own hard currency account, was allowed to treat foreign patients, decide on the number of employees and the size of their salaries and engage in business activities outside the medical field (for example, in agriculture). After that decree the Fyodorov Center became almost totally independent of the Health Ministry.
Fyodorov is building MNTK branches all over the country and abroad (in Italy, Poland, Germany, Spain, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates). He has converted a sea-going vessel, 'Peter I', into an eye clinic which sails the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.
In the spring of 1990 Fyodorov was allocated land in the Moscow Region for an MNTK farm. On October 28, 1992 the closed joint stock company Protasovo MG was registered. It is the legal owner of the land Fyodorov being the company president.
He was a member of the CPSU from 1957 until 1990.
In 1989 he was elected people's deputy of the USSR as part of the CPSU's quota of deputies. In the spring of 1989, before the First Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, he was among the founders of the Moscow Club of Deputies. Many of the ideas of that Club were used at the First Congress by democratically-minded deputies who subsequently formed the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies. He was a member of the Committee for Economic Reform in the Supreme Soviet. At the 2nd Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR he was one of the 17 deputies promoted by the CPSU who voted for the repeal of Article 6 of the Constitution that provided for the leading role of the CPSU.
In June 1990, at the First Congress of the RSFSR Union of Lease Holders and Entrepreneurs he was elected the Union's President.
In 1990 he joined the Democratic Party of Russia (DPR) and was briefly a member of its board.
In July 1991, together with Nikolai Travkin, Stanislav Shatalin, Yevgeny Ambartsumov, Stanislav Govorukhin and Shodmon Yusupov he launched an appeal for the creation of an inter-republican United Democratic Party (UDP). An organizing committee of the UDP headed by Shatalin was formed, but the party was a non-starter.
In February 1991 he was a member of the Supreme Consultative and Coordinating Council under the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, later renamed the Supreme Consultative Council under the RF President. Fyodorov was not included in the Presidential Council which replaced the SCC in February 1993.
In October 1991 Fyodorov was among the candidates considered for the post of Russia's Prime Minister. However, he turned down the offer.
In the summer of 1992 he was among the co-founders of the Foundation in support of the Government of Popular Trust created by a group of chairpersons of the district Soviets in Moscow and he became a member of its board (the chairman was former People's Deputy of the USSR Vladimir Belyayev). The Foundation was conceived by its organizers as a supra-party political center and its founders expected that the Foundation would seek the inclusion in the government of competent and professionally trained politicians and specialists, or a change of government. According to Fyodorov, the Foundation was going to perform the functions of "the government's personnel department". The initiative, however, did not get off the ground.
Fyodorov joined the Economic Freedom Party in June 1992. Shortly afterwards the party's leader Konstantin Borovoi abandoned one-man chairmanship in favor of co-chairmen (Borovoi, Fyodorov and Viktor Zolotaryov). In the autumn of 1992 the EFP proposed Fyodorov for the post of mayor of Moscow in the election that was scheduled for December 1992. But he refused to run because as he put it, he was unable to "transfer the ownership of the means of production into the hands of the working people". Without which, in his opinion, "reform could not proceed".
In June 1993 he resigned from the Economic Freedom Party because Borovoi unconditionally backed the "President's draft Constitution" which Fyodorov considers to be "pro-monarchy," granting the President excessive powers.
In September 1993, on behalf of the MNTK, he sent a letter to President Yeltsin urging him to repeal his decree on the dissolution of Parliament and to restore the live support systems of the White House ("The most brutal rulers of the world drowned their enemies in blood. But you... have chosen to drown yours in faeces?")
In October 1993 he was on the list of candidates for the State Duma promoted by the electoral bloc of the Russian Democratic Reform Movement (RDRM) headed by Gavriil Popov. He was number two on the list (after Anatoly Sobchak). The list never made the 5 percent barrier.
In September 1994 he became a member of the organizing committee of the United Social Democratic Movement (chaired by Aleksandr Yakovlev), but he did not join the Russian Social Democratic Party founded on its basis in early 1995.
On January 28, 1995 he presided over the founding congress of the Workers Self-Government Party (PST). He conceived of the plan to create the movement as early as spring 1994. The programmatic idea of PST is that the work collectives should own the means of production. He was elected chairman of the PST Higher Council.
In January 1995 he told a press conference that he was "ready to run for president." In January 1995 a group of deputies which called itself "Civil Initiative" and did not claim any official status issued a Statement in which the "body of ideas proposed by Svyatoslav Nikolayevich Fyodorov" was described as "a sensible alternative to the current plethora of mutually contradicting recipes for taking Russia out of its crisis" (the Statement was signed by 15 deputies including Tatyana Chertovitskaya, Viktor Borodin, Vladimir Katrenko and others).
The candidates on the PST lists lost the elections for the State Duma on December 17, 1995, but Fyodorov himself was elected to the Duma in the majority district in Cheboksary. In the Duma he joined a group of deputies called "People's Power" and was elected a deputy chairman of the group (the chairman was Nikolai Ryzhkov).
In February 1996, together with Stanislav Govorukhin, Alexander Lebed, Oleg Rumyantsev, Sergei Glazyev and others he took part in the consultations about creation of the left-center electoral bloc The Third Force for presidential elections.
On February 9, 1996, the Central Election Commission registered the official representatives of the group that promoted Fydorov's candidacy for president of Russia.
On March 15, 1995, he signed together with Grigory Yavlinsky and Aleksandr Lebed, a statement against the Duma resolutions, initiated by the CPRF and People's Power, on the Belovezh Accords of December 1991. He voted against the renunciation of the Union Treaty of 1922 and against the resolution whereby Russia recognized the results of the referendum on the preservation of the USSR.
He attributes the country's continuing downward slide to the continuing division of society into two classes - employer-managers and hired workers without property. He comes out for the transfer of the means of production into the ownership of work collectives and for giving workers a decisive say in the management of enterprises and distribution of profits. He described land privatization through the issue of vouchers as a "delirious idea". He is an admirer of the former Chilean strongman Pinochet whom he once described as "a man with the heart, mind and soul of Christ."
He is a member of the International Russian Club (the president of the Club is Mikhail Bocharov), chairman of the council of Rosmedbank, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a full member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
He has more than 180 inventions to his name. He holds the titles of Merited Inventor of the USSR and Hero of Socialist Labor (1987), the Academy of Sciences' Lomonosov Gold Medal and Paleolog and Oscar prizes (USA).
In 1991, together with Eduard Sagalayev and others, he co-founded the Moscow Casino and Club Royal.
He is fluent in English.
His hobbies include horse riding, swimming and hunting. He is married and has four daughters: Irina is an eye surgeon and a Candidate of Medical Sciences, Yulia is an eye surgeon with a medical decree, Olga is completing her post-graduate clinical course on ophthalmology and Elina is a Spanish linguist, a graduate of the Moscow University Philological Department.