His father Alexander Semionovich Russov came from peasants of the Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, his mother Iraida Semionovna Nemtsova was from Kostroma.

In 1951–1955 Russov taught drawing in the secondary schools of Leningrad, while continuing to work on his painting skills using the experience gained while studying at the Academy.

In 1955, Russov was admitted to the Leningrad Union of Soviet artists on the recommendations of the famous painters Piotr Buchkin, Yuri Neprintsev and Veniamin Kremer.

He meets Ekaterina Vasilievna Balebina (born 29 December 1933, the daughter of Vasily Balebin, the famous torpedo bomber, Hero of the Soviet Union), who will soon become his wife, the mother of his son Andrei and the main muse.

In the same year, Lev Russov met with Yevgeny Mravinsky, their relationship grew into a long-years friendship, to which we owe several portraits of the outstanding conductor, created during 1950–1980s.

According to the researchers of the artist's creativity, with the full strength Russov's pictorial talent was revealed in a series of portraits of his contemporaries painted in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, which brought fame and recognition to the author.

Characterizing the work of Russov, art historians Anatoli Dmitrenko and Ruslan Bakhtiyarov note: In Leningrad portrait-painting at the turn of the 1960s a certain conflict still persisted between the task of producing a typified image and the simultaneous desire on the part of the artist to touch upon “the hidden movements of the soul”.

Organically connecting the figure and the background, which he successfully used as a means of heightening the expressiveness of the image, Russov at the same time accords each of his subjects the right to “personal space”, as, for example, in the portraits of Ekaterina Balebina, Natalya Orlova or the young country girl Natasha Savelyeva.

[10]Trips in the mid-1950s to Oredezh, first to Nakol village, and then to Pavshino, marked the beginning of a remarkable series of portraits of children and young people.

The portraits of this period fall at the time of the highest creative upsurge of Russov as the painter, and constitute the most valuable part of his diverse artistic heritage.

The manner of the artist is distinguished by a powerful pictorial language, wide writing, sharp composition, interest in unexpected rakurs.

Rusov possessed a rare ability to capture the fleeting states of model, to quickly embody a pictorial idea on canvas – immediately and unusually convincingly.

Some of his best works of this period Russov painted in the village of Pavshino on the Oredezh River near Leningrad, where in the late 1950s a group of young artists settled: G. Bagrov, E. Shram, K. Slavin and N. Slavina, L. Kuzov, A. Yakovlev, G. Antonov.

E. Kovtun, in his article Notes on an Art Exhibition in the newspaper Leningrad Evening dated 29 November 1958, wrote about the amazing immediacy and freshness of feelings that bribes in this work of L.

in Leningrad Pravda of 2 December 1958, wrote about this work: Portrait "Natasha" by Lev Russov pleases of the sincere interest of the artist in the inner world of man.

Lyovushka was aware of all of Yevgeny Aleksandrovich's creative and everyday experiences, he loved music, knew it, had an excellent memory and refined taste.

These parties, of course, were slightly accompanied by vodka and Prishvin-style stories until late at night..[18]In the 1970s, Russov turned to the theme of two great contemporaries – Dmitry Shostakovich and Yevgeny Mravinsky, she found its embodiment in the picture The Leningrad Symphony.

[20][21] These works, and above all the double portrait of Till and Lamme,[22] are also interesting in that the artist gave Thill features a close resemblance to the author.

Most of his still lifes convey not only the interior of the artist's workshop and the object world surrounding him, but also the atmosphere, the flour of creativity in which the creator's ideas are born and implemented.

A man of independent views, talented, direct, sometimes ruthless in assessments and judgments, astonishing those who knew him closely with his monstrous capacity for work, he eschewed the public life of the Union of Artists, was intolerant of any manifestations of mediocrity and imitation of creativity.

In fairness, we must admit that the existing system did not reject such artists, allowing them to have almost free materials and a workshop for creative work in exchange for minimal loyalty.

From his hands came out a lot of superb sculptures, from small figurines to large forms, such as Russian Icarus and the relief on the epic theme of Zastava, Folk singers.