Petr Shelokhonov joined the partisans resistance. He made his own puppet theater in 1943 and performed parodies of Hitler. In 1945, he became a piano student at the Kiev Conservatory of Music. In the 1950s, he moved to the Siberian city of Irkutsk. There, he graduated from Irkutsk Drama School. Then he worked in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, and also in Odesa and Kyiv, Ukraine.