Serhiy Ostapenko

Serhiy Stepanovych Ostapenko (; – 1937) was a Ukrainian economist, statesman, and political activist. In early 1919 he served as Chairman of the Council of People's Ministers of Ukrainian People's Republic, a position equivalent to the present-day office of Prime Minister of Ukraine. Early years Ostapenko was born in November 1881 in the village of , near Zhytomyr. Ostapenko was born into a family of poor peasants and his father had another job as a freight transporter. From 1893 to 1897, Ostapenko attended the local elementary school, after which, he enrolled into an agrarian middle school in of Kremenets uyezd. In 1904, he started working as a teacher in a two-grade school of Turiysk of Kovel uyezd. In 1905, Ostapenko was arrested for being a member of the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He spent the next three years in jail for "political reasons", as he claimed. After his release, Ostapenko had some trouble of finding employment. He graduated from the Vladimir Cadet Corps after final tests in 1909 and the same year enrolled into the Economic school of Kyiv Commercial Institute (now Kyiv National Economic University). Upon his graduation in 1913 he was sent to Germany for extended studies in Economics. In 1913 he returned to Ukraine where he found the job as head of the Bureau of Statistics in Balta uyezd of Podolia Governorate. In 1914 Ostapenko was transferred to Kharkiv where he headed the Bureau of Statistics for the Mining Industry of Sloboda Ukraine. Later he returned to Kyiv where he worked as a private-docent in the Kyiv Commercial Institute until 1917.