List of people from Poltava

This list contains notable people who were born or lived in Poltava, Ukraine.

Marusia Churai Memorial, 2021

Nikolai Gogol, 1845

Ivan Paskevich, 1823

Symon Petliura, 1920s

Alina Treiger, 2010

• Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884) Parisian painter and diarist.
• Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (1884–1963) historian, longest-serving President of Israel from 1952 to 1963.
• Hanka Bielicka (1915–2006) a Polish singer and actress, known by the name Hanna
• Oleksandr Bilash (1931–2003) composer of lyric songs, ballads, operas, operettas and oratorios
• Sofya Bogomolets (1856–1892) a Russian revolutionary and political prisoner.
• Boris Brasol (1885–1963), lawyer and literary critic and a White Russian immigrant to the United States.
• Moura Budberg (1892–1974), a Russian adventuress and suspected double agent of OGPU & MI6.
• Semion Braude (1911–2003) was a Soviet and Ukrainian physicist and radio astronomer
• Nat Carr (1886–1944) an American character actor of the silent and early talking picture eras.
• Gregori Chmara (1878–1970) a stage and film actor whose career spanned six decades.
• Marusia Churai (1625–1653) a semi-mythical Ukrainian Baroque composer, poet, and singer.
• Andriy Danylko (born 1973) stage name Verka Serduchka; a Ukrainian comedian, actor, and singer.
• Sam Dreben (1878–1925), a highly decorated soldier in the US Army and a mercenary
• Vladimir Gajdarov (1893–1978) a Russian film actor and star of Russian and German silent cinema.
• Yuliy Ganf (1898–1973) a graphic artist, caricaturist, illustrator and poster designer.
• Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), a novelist, short story writer and playwright.
• Grigory Gricher (1893–1945), Soviet Ukrainian film director and screenwriter of Jewish descent
• Alexander Gurwitsch (1874–1954) biologist and medical scientist; originated Morphogenetic field theory
• Oksana Ivanenko (1906–1997) – Ukrainian children's writer and translator
• Vladimir Ivashko (1932–1994), politician, acting General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• Philip Jaffe (1895–1980) a left-wing American businessman, editor and author.
• Ernst Jedliczka (1855–1904) a Russian-German pianist, piano pedagogue, and music critic.
• Mykola Karpov (1929–2003), Ukrainian playwright.
• Dmitri Kessel (1902–1995), photojournalist, Life magazine 1944–1972 and war correspondent
• Vera Kholodnaya (1893–1919) an actress of the early Imperial Russian cinema.
• Yuri Kondratyuk (1897–1942), astronautics and spaceflight pioneer; foresaw reaching the Moon
• Ivan Kotliarevsky (1769–1838) a Ukrainian writer, poet and playwright and social activist
• Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933) Russian Marxist revolutionary; Bolshevik Soviet people's Commissar
• Anton Makarenko (1888–1939), educator, social worker and writer and top educational theorist
• Yuri Levitin (1912–1993) a Soviet Russian composer of classical music.
• Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) composer, pianist, conductor; founder first Ukrainian classical music school
• Patriarch Mstyslav (1898–1993), Ukrainian Orthodox Church hierarch
• Matvei Muranov (1873–1959) a Ukrainian Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician and statesman.
• Yelyzaveta Myloradovych (1832–1890), Ukrainian philanthropist and community activist.
• Panas Myrny (1849–1920) a Ukrainian prose writer and playwright
• Jensen Noen (born 1987) a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, cinematographer and writer.
• Oleksiy Onyschenko (born 1933) a philosopher, academic and culture theorist
• Mikhail Ostrogradsky (1801–1862), a Ukrainian mathematician, mechanic and physicist
• Olena Pchilka (1849–1930), a Ukrainian publisher, writer, ethnographer and civil activist.
• Ivan Paskevich (1782–1856), Ukrainian military leader in Imperial Russian service.
• Symon Petliura (1879–1926) a Ukrainian politician, journalist and military leader of Ukraine's struggle for independence following the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917.
• Vladimir Picheta (1878–1947), a Belarusian historian, first rector of the Belarusian State University
• Zhanna Prokhorenko (1940–2011) a Soviet and Russian actress
• Sasha Putrya (1977–1989) Ukrainian artist, died aged 11 from leukemia.
• Svitlana Pyrkalo (born 1976) a London-based writer, journalist and former BBC radio producer
• Boris Schwanwitsch (1889–1957) a Russian entomologist who specialised in Lepidoptera.
• Moshe Zvi Segal (1904–1985), rabbi and activist in Israeli organizations, including Etzel and Lechi.
• Bert Shefter (1902–1999) a film composer who worked primarily in America.
• Avraham Shlonsky (1900–1973), Israeli poet and editor
• Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722–1794) a Ukrainian poet, philosopher and composer
• Ivan Steshenko (1873–1918), a Ukrainian civic and political activist, writer and Govt. minister.
• Maria Tarnowska (1877–1949), femme fatale, famously convicted of murder in Venice in 1910.
• Elias Tcherikower (1881–1943), a Jewish historian of Judaism and the Jewish people.
• Alina Treiger (born 1979) the first female rabbi to be ordained in Germany since WWII.
• Yelena Ubiyvovk (1918–1942) a partisan and leader of a Komsomol cell during WWII.
• Paisius Velichkovsky (1722–1794), Eastern Orthodox monk and theologian, promoted staretsdom
• Nikolai Yaroshenko (1846–1898) a Ukrainian painter of portraits, genre paintings and drawings.
• Ya'akov Zerubavel (1886–1967) co-founder of Poale Zion and Yiddish advocate
• Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958) a Soviet writer and satirist, who according to some sources was born in Poltava but later claimed to have been born in St Petersburg.

Ruslan Rotan, 2016

• Leonid Bartenyev (1933–2021) a 100 metre team silver medallist at the 1956 and 1960 Summer Olympics
• Viktor Buhaievskyi (1939–2009), Soviet and Ukrainian professional footballer
• Sergei Diyev (born 1958) a Russian football manager and former player with over 600 club caps
• Serhiy Konovalov (born 1972) a football coach and former footballer with 270 club caps and 22 for Ukraine
• Oleksandr Melaschenko (born 1978) a football striker with over 320 club caps and 16 for Ukraine
• Ruslan Rotan (born 1981) a former professional footballer with 382 club caps and 100 for Ukraine; now manager of the Ukraine national under-21 football team
• Ivan Shariy (born 1957) is a former Soviet and Ukrainian footballer with over 500 club caps