He was born on 23 June 1932 in the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in the USSR in a family of Russian ethnicity.

The Fedotov family returned to Stalingrad only after its liberation, but without Alexandrov's father, who fought on the front and died in battle Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

In particular, he still owns the unaccounted flight altitude record (37,650 metres) for manned jet aircraft, established on 31 August 1977, in an experimental MiG-25M fighter.

In that flight there was a false alarm indication of the emergency fuel reserve system, and Fedotov decided to land.

Believing that there was little fuel on the plane, he made a sharp manoeuver, but the heavy, fuel-filled airplane rolled over and dived into the ground.