Gennady Yudin was born in a village near the Ekaterininsky state distillery in the Loginovskaya volost of the Tarsky district, where his father worked. Vasily Sergeyevich Yudin worked at this distillery from 1827 to 1840, and then became a merchant of the III guild. After Gennady's birth, the family moved to Tobolsk in 1847. In 1856, he graduated from the Tobolsk gymnasium and worked in the liquor tax system in Minusinsk from the age of 12.

Yudin actively engaged in self-education: he studied German and French, subscribed to magazines, collected books, and maintained extensive correspondence with relatives and colleagues. He trained himself to make copies of all letters, which he then bound into books, forming the basis of his unique archive. During business trips to Krasnoyarsk, he often visited the local Drama Theater.

In 1863, Yudin opened his own commercial enterprise with an initial capital of 600 rubles. He became a temporary merchant in Achinsk, then a merchant of the II guild in Minusinsk, opened a wholesale warehouse in the village of Balakhty, and engaged in the wine trade, offering rum, liqueurs, cognac, and various types of vodka.

In 1866, he married Yevgeniya Mikhailovna Nigritskaya, the daughter of merchants from Tomsk and the granddaughter of a priest, originally from the village of Karauilno-Ostrozhenskoye.

Yudin won the lottery twice: first 200,000 rubles, then 75,000 rubles. With this money, at the end of 1870, he built the Leonid distillery near Balakhty, named after his son, and acquired gold mines in the Achinsk, Minusinsk, and Yenisei districts. Together with K. S. Kuritsyn, he founded the Osinovskaya gold mining company.

In 1873 and 1874, Yudin lived in St. Petersburg and visited the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873. In November 1881, he completed the construction of his distillery. In 1889, he visited the exhibition in Paris.

Yudin outlived the deaths of his sons: on March 2, 1896, his 16-year-old son Mikhail died, and on April 24, 1899, 27-year-old Vasily passed away in Kyiv.

Gennady Yudin died on March 17, 1912, in Krasnoyarsk and was buried at the Troitskoye cemetery.