Poraiko was born on 12 October 1888 in Ustia [uk], which was then part of Austria-Hungary.[1] After graduating from the Kolomyia Gymnasium in 1910,[1] he studied at Chernivtsi University and Lviv University, graduating in 1914. On the outbreak of World War I he was recruited into the Austro-Hungarian Army, but was captured by the Russians in 1915 and held as a prisoner of war in Astrakhan.[1] He supported the October Revolution of 1917, and became head of the Astrakhan provincial economic council and member of its provincial executive committee after the Bolsheviks took power.[1] In 1919 was sent to Ukraine, where he took part in the foundation of the Ukrainian SSR. He was first a member of the Presidium of the Temporary Committee of Communists of Eastern Galicia and Bukovina, until February 1920 when he was appointed commander of the Red Ukrainian Galician Army (ChUGA), which ceased to exist follows it liquidation in April 1920.[1] Afterwards, he was appointed Hhead of the Executive Committee of the Poltava Provincial Coucil, and then from 1921 to 1923 was Executive Committee of the Podillia Provincial Council.[1]
From 1923 to 1924 he served as deputy head of the Council of People’s Commissars (RNK) of the Ukrainian SSR, and up until his appointment as Commissar of Justice was head of the Ukrainian Agricultural Bank.[1] He acted as the Ukrainian SSR's second Prosecutor General from 1927 to 1930 and People's Commissar of Justice.[1] From 1930 to 1937 he was deputy head of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR.[1]
He was arrested by the NKVD charges of participation in the "bourgeois-nationalist anti-Soviet organization of the former Borotbists" and "the Ukrainian Military Organization". He was shot in October 1937 and posthumously rehabilitated in 1957.[2]
