Nikolay Nilovich Burdenko (; – 11 November 1946) was a Russian Empire and Soviet surgeon, the founder of Russian neurosurgery. He was Surgeon-General of the Red Army (1937–1946), an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences (from 1939), an academician and the first director of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (1944–1946), a Hero of Socialist Labor (from 1943), Colonel General of medical services, and a Stalin Prize winner (1941). He was a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, First World War, Winter War and the German-Soviet War. Early years Nikolay Burdenko was born on 3 June 1876 in the village of Kamenka in the Nizhnelomovsky Uyezd of the Penza Governorate (modern-day Kamenka, Kamensky District, Penza Oblast of Russia), one of the eight children of Nil Karpovich Burdenko (1839—1906) and Varvara Markianovna Burdenko (née Smagina) (1851—1897). His paternal grandfather Karp Fyodorovich Burdenko came from serfs of the Kuznetsky Uezd of the Saratov Governorate where he served as a landlord's estate manager and his wife — as a maid; after being granted freedom they moved to Penza and then — to Verhniy Lomov of the Penza Governorate. Nikolay's father also worked as an estate manager for the major general Vladimir Voeykov (ru) who served in the Svita of Nicholas II and was close to the Emperor's family. Nikolay's mother was a housewife who came from peasants of the Tambov Governorate. In 1885, Burdenko finished Kamenka zemstvo school and in 1886 entered Penza theological school to study for an Orthodox priest. In 1891, he entered Penza theological seminary and was soon sent to the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy as the best student. In 1897, he left it to study medicine at the recently opened Faculty of Medicine of the Tomsk Imperial University. There, he became fascinated with anatomy and operative surgery, and by the third course he was appointed as a prosector's assistant. He was then excluded from the university for participating in the 1899 Russian student strike, but was pardoned and restored just to be excluded for the second time in 1901 on the same account. After that, he was forced to leave Tomsk. Medical career On 11 October 1901, he entered the fourth course of the Imperial University of Yuryev (modern-day University of Tartu), Faculty of Medicine. Once again, he became involved with the student protest movement and had to spend a year in the Kherson Governorate treating children