Zadornov's mother, Elena Matusevich (1909-2003), came from an old noble family, which can trace its roots to the Polish king Stephen Bathory.

[2] As a child, Zadornov listened to his father reading him works of literature before he went to sleep, such as classic writings of adventure and suspense, and poems.

During that period, a person saying, in public, anything negative or insultive to the government, was in high risk of being arrested and jailed – surprisingly Zadornov was not.

New York Times had made a conclusion that “reconstruction has really started in USSR” (“что в СССР действительно началась перестройка”).

His jokes in the end of 20th century concentrated more on satirizing USSR and its inhabitants, and later shifted to mockery and criticizing of the West.

In 2002, Zadornov rescinded his visa to the United States as a protest to the American athletes' flag-waving behavior at the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics.

[4] As Mikhail sometimes targeted Russia's top power figures, some of his sketches were rejected or edited by state TV stations on political grounds.

He supported the revisionist fringe theory that the Russian language descends from the Vedas and Etruria, put forward by philosopher Valeriy Chudinov.

Zadornov was married in 1971 to Velta Kalnbērziņa (Велта Яновна Калнберзина); she is the daughter of Soviet Latvian politician Jānis Kalnbērziņš and a professor of English in the Philological Faculty of the Moscow State University.

In the 2000s he converted to Rodnovery (Slavic Native Faith), and expressed his favour towards the social ideal of the Ringing Cedars' Anastasian movement, that is to say the "ancestral settlements".