Makarenko, Andrii

Makarenko, Andrii [Макаренко, Андрій], b 17 July 1886 in Hadiach, Poltava gubernia, d 28 September 1963 in Houston, Texas. Civic figure. During the Ukrainian struggle for independence (1917–20), while holding a high position in the railway administration for Ukraine, he used his influence to organize Ukrainian railway workers, and in the summer of 1917 he formed a railway regiment, which became a part of the Army of the Ukrainian National Republic. Under the Hetman government he was appointed chairman of a department in the Ministry of Railways. As a member of the Ukrainian National Union he helped organize the overthrow of Pavlo Skoropadsky’s Hetman government and then sat on the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic. In the interwar period he lived in Czechoslovakia, where he completed a doctorate at the Ukrainian Higher Pedagogical Institute. After the Second World War he fled from Soviet forces to Germany, where he worked to save Ukrainian displaced persons and refugees from repatriation to the USSR. In 1951 he settled in the United States of America.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]