Viktor Makarov (born 1953) is a Ukrainian pianist, teacher, Honoured Artist of Ukraine.
Viktor Makarov was born in 1953 in Armavir, and grew up in Donbas since 1956. He received his musical education at the Kharkiv Special Music School and at the Kharkiv Institute of Arts in the class of Regina Horowitz, and did postgraduate studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in the class of T. Kravchenko.
After graduation, in 1981-1988 he taught at the Kharkiv Institute of Arts, and since 1985 he has headed the piano department at the Kharkiv State Music School. In 1998, together with his family and 5 students, he immigrated to Australia, where he began teaching. Among Makarov's pupils are the winners of the Horowitz and Krainev competitions, including Oleksiy Koltakov, Oleksiy Yemtsov, Oleksandr Havryliuk and others.
In 2004, he was accused of sexual harassment by his own students (in particular, O. Havryliuk) and was sentenced to 16 years in prison and stripped of his Australian citizenship. While behind bars, he wrote a book entitled Lessons from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (prisoner's account #380046), in which he calls all the charges falsified and criticises the Australian justice system, drawing parallels with the activities of Soviet punitive bodies. Later, some of the charges against V. Makarov were dropped
