The choreographer was born on August 26, 1935, in the village of Krasny Oktyabr in the Yenakiieve District of the Donetsk Oblast. His father, Ivan Yakovych, worked as a coal miner at Mine No. 1-2 “Krasnyi Oktyabr,” and his mother, Maria Yakovna, worked there as a librarian while also leading the drama club at the local community center.
In October 1941, his father was killed during a Nazi bombing raid directly on the mine grounds. His mother, with her three children, was unable to board any evacuation trains and found herself under Nazi occupation. Yurii’s older sister, Lesia, was taken by the Nazis to Germany for forced labor. To feed little Yurii and his brother, his mother traded pre-war belongings for bread and other food. Later, she found work as an actress at a theater, and Yurii also began appearing as an extra and even landed his first role.
In the fall of 1943, the Gureyev family moved to the village of Ivanivka in the Bobrynets District, and in the fall of 1947—to live with their grandmother in the village of Stara Huta in the Vovkovynets District of the Kamianets-Podilskyi (now Khmelnytskyi) Oblast. It was in Vovkovynets that the choreographer, who had fallen in love with the Podillia region, began to develop his craft: there, Yuriy actively participated in the school’s and the cultural center’s artistic activities, and toured all the villages in the district with the local propaganda troupe. The young man dreamed of becoming an actor, like his mother, and even applied to the Kyiv Theater Institute. However, he ended up studying by correspondence at the Kamianets-Podilskyi Pedagogical Institute, and life led him to devote himself to choreography. Yurii Gureev’s mentor was the then-methodologist at the Khmelnytskyi Regional House of Folk Art
