Chukarin was born in Krasnoarmeyskoye village in
Donets Governorate (modern-day
Novoazovsk Raion of the
Donetsk Oblast) to a
Don Cossack father Ivan Evlampievich Chukarin and a
Pontic Greek mother Hristina Klimentievna Lamizova. In 1924 his family moved to
Mariupol where he started training in gymnastics. He began gymnastics classes in the yard on the horizontal bar, then in the school section under the leadership of Vitaliy Polikarpovich Popovich. During the Stalinist years of the "Great Terror", the Chukarin family experienced a tragedy: in 1937, Chukarin's father was repressed for a letter to his relatives who lived in Romania in which he asked for help with food. Later, Chukarin studied at the
Institute of Physical Education in Kyiv. In 1940, Chukarin became a champion of Ukraine during the Ukrainian championship in Kharkiv and received the title of the Master of Sports. In the summer of 1941, with the start of the
German–Soviet War, he volunteered for the
Red Army. He fought under the general
Mikhail Kirponos. Sometime in September of 1941, Chukarin was wounded in action, taken prisoner of war near
Poltava (
Kyiv Cauldron) and sent to a prisoner camp in
Sandbostel. He then went through a chain of 17 prisoner camps and by the time he was freed in 1945 weighed only . He was not accepted back to the sports institute in Kyiv and studied in a
similar institution in Lviv. In 1951, for his sports performances, Chukarin was granted an honorary sports title as the Honoured Master of Sports. In 1952, when the Soviet Union joined the
International Olympic Movement, Chukarin was 30. By then, Chukarin gained much weight and was considered bulky for a gymnast. As a result, he had low scores on the floor, yet he won six medals, including the individual all-around by a margin of 0.7 points. Nevertheless, with four gold and two silver medals, he became a star feature of the Soviet Olympic team and the leader among the Olympic medalists. Aged 35, he won five more Olympic medals at the
1956 Summer Olympics, including a silver on the floor. He recounted his sports career in the 1955 book entitled
The Road to the Peaks (Put K Vershinam). In 1961, he coached
Armenian gymnastics team, and in 1963 became an assistant professor at the
Lviv Institute of Physical Culture. He died in 1984 and was buried at the
Lychakiv Cemetery. One of the streets in Lviv was named after him. ==See also==