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Svyatoslav Nikolayevich Fyodorov (* August 8, 1927 in Proskurov; † June 2, 2000 in Moscow) was a Russian professor of ophthalmology, politician and presidential candidate. He is considered one of the pioneers of refractive surgery.

Biography
Svyatoslav Fyodorov was born the son of a divisional commander of the Red Army and, after graduating from school in 1943, planned to become a pilot in the warring Soviet Air Force, according to military family tradition. During his training, he survived a crash landing, after which, however, a leg had to be amputated.

Forced to change education, he turned to training as a doctor and enrolled at the Rostov-on-Don Medical Institute. After his licensure as a doctor in 1952, he completed his compulsory years as a village doctor in the village of Veshenskaya near Rostov-on-Don, later in Lysva district of Sverdlovsk. Returning to Rostov-on-Don, he completed his training as an ophthalmologist at the Rostov Medical Institute and, from 1958, worked as medical director of the Cheboksary branch of the Helmholtz State Institute. In 1960 he developed a crystalline plastic lens there, which he also implanted himself. From 1961 to 1967 he headed the eye clinic at the Archangelsk Medical Institute until he was appointed director of the “laboratory for the implantation of artificial lenses” at the 3rd Moscow Medical Institute. In 1966, he was one of the founding members of the International Intraocular Implant Club, founded under the auspices of the Royal Society of Medicine during the tenure of Sir Harold Ridley, the pioneer of intraocular lens implantation into the eye.

In 1969, he began to explore and produce an artificial cornea. However, this less successful project led him to the field of corneal surgery and the development of radial keratotomy, a technique that had already failed other eye surgeons, most recently Tsutomu Sato. from Japan in the 1930s, due to a lack of predictability. His development of relatively good normograms on the number, depth and length of cuts in the cornea, which had to be made to change the refractive power of the eye, led to his international recognition and he followed many invitations to international congresses, where he always provided attraction with his lectures and surgical courses. His ability to achieve freedom from eyeglasses and contact lenses with radial keratotomy quickly became a trend operation, especially in the USA, with thousands of procedures per year, while in Europe the emerging excimer-eye laser therapy of this operation quickly lost its place because of the known daily fluctuations in refractive power and glare effects at night. After the German ophthalmologist and physicist Theo Seiler the radial keratotomy mi