Sydorenko, Hryhorii

Sydorenko, Hryhorii [Сидоренко, Григорій], b 10 September 1874 in the Kherson gubernia, d 6 February 1924 in Prague. Engineer, political activist, and diplomat. A graduate in engineering (1889), he became a director of the Siberian Trunk Railway and headed the Ukrainian Hromada in Tomsk, Siberia. He became a member of the Central Rada, although not affiliated with a specific party (he considered himself a nonpartisan social democrat). He was an assistant to the deputy secretary of railways and then was minister of postal and telegraph service in the Ukrainian National Republic government led by Vsevolod Holubovych (February–April 1918). In the Hetman government he was a member of the presidium of the All-Ukrainian Union of Zemstvos and then a delegate (together with Dmytro Antonovych) of the Ukrainian National Union in negotiations with representatives of the Entente powers in Iaşi (November 1918). He was leader of the UNR delegation at the Paris Peace Conference (January–August 1919) and UNR ambassador in Vienna (succeeding Viacheslav Lypynsky) in 1919–22. In 1923 he became an instructor and library director at the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady, Czechoslovakia. He wrote a number of works on railway construction.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]