He became a communist partisan during the Ukrainian Civil War of 1918–1920.
He became a journalist and by 1921 was deputy director of the All-Ukrainian Communist Institute of Journalism.
As an opponent of Joseph Stalin, he was arrested but survived the gulag becoming a post-war refugee in West Germany.
During the Nazi Germany occupation, in 1942 Maisternko was a director of Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus in Kiev.
He was a prominent member of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party and edited their anti-Stalinist workers paper Vpered.