Yuri Nikulin; Russian Comic, Circus Chief

Yuri Nikulin, Russia’s most-beloved comic actor and director of the Moscow Circus, died Thursday at a Moscow clinic where he had undergone heart surgery two weeks ago, doctors said. He was 75.

Nikulin, born in 1921 in Smolensk, was a World War II veteran and became a Moscow Circus clown in 1950. He was appointed director of the circus in 1984, a post he still held.

Although Nikulin was closely associated with the circus, a cherished Russian institution, he owed much of his nationwide popularity to his movie roles, starting with his 1958 debut in “Girl With a Guitar.” His typical role was that of a slightly silly, average guy, witty but never mean-spirited.

He starred in Soviet comedy classics that included the 1967 “Caucasian Prisoner,” in which he played the leader of an incompetent trio of crooks, and the 1968 “Diamond Arm,” in which he played a mild-mannered man who gets caught up in a diamond-smuggling scheme.

He also starred in the gloomy and acclaimed 1977 film, “Twenty Days Without War.”

Many of his most famous lines became part of the national culture, as did his song, “Ah, It’s All the Same to Us.”

Nikulin adapted after Russia’s enormous social upheaval following the end of Communist repression and censorship. Commenting on the dearth of jokes about current Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin in 1996, Nikulin told The Times: “In the past, there was a tinge of risk involved. I still remember when political jokes were told in whispers. Russians love to laugh, and they never laugh harder than over something that could get them in trouble.”

The actor was awarded the People’s Actor of the USSR title in 1973 and in 1990 was given the former Soviet Union’s top peacetime award, the Hero of Socialist Labor.