Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky

Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky (russian: Михаил Иванович Туган-Барановский, uk, Михайло Іванович Туган-Барановський, romanized: ''Mykhailo Ivanovych Tuhan-Baranovskyi'') was a Ukrainian economist, politician, statesman. He is remembered as one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and one of the earliest Ukrainian ministers of finances in the Vynnychenko's General Secretariat of the Central Council of Ukraine. In professional circles he is remembered as a leading exponent of Legal Marxism in the Tsarist Russian Empire and was the author of numerous works dealing with the theory of value, the distribution of a social revenue, history of managerial development, and fundamentals of cooperative managerial activities.

Early life

Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky was born on 8 January 1865 in the village of Solyonoe in the Kupyansky Uyezd of the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). His father's distant ancestors were Lipka Tatars who had come to Lithuania in the 14th century; the full family name was Tugan Mirza Baranovsky.

Tugan-Baranovsky attended high school in the cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv, developing an early affinity for philosophy, including the works of Immanuel Kant. In 1884 he entered Kharkiv University, beginning his studies in the natural sciences. He was awarded the degree of Candidate of Sciences in 1888 but he became interested in political economy and wound up completing his studies as an external student with a degree from the school's Faculty of Law and Economics in 1890. While in college Tugan-Baranovsky became active in the revolutionary movement which sought to overthrow Tsarism in Russia, briefly making the acquaintance of Vladimir Lenin's older brother, Aleksandr Ulyanov, who was executed in 1887 for his part in the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander III.Kindersley, ''The First Russian Revisionists,'' p. 52.

In November 1886 Tugan-Baranovsky was arrested for participating in a student demonstration in St. Petersburg marking the 25th anniversary of the death of critical writer Nikolay Dobrolyubov. As a result of the arrest Tugan-Baranovsky was expelled from the capital city, falling out of contact with the ill-fated older Ulyanov. Tugan-Baranovsky married the daughter of the director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Lydia Davydova, in 1889.Kindersley, ''The First Russian Revisionists,'' p. 53.

Academic career

Shortly after his marriage, Tugan-Baranovsky began what would be a long running and esteemed academic career. His first scholarly article, "The Doctrine of the Marginal Utility of Economic Goods", saw print in October 1890 in the journal ''Iuridicheskii Vestnik'' (Jurisprudence Courier). In this work, which presaged his later criticism of Marxism, Tugan-Baranovsky argued that the labor theory of value and contemporary Marginalist economics were in basic agreement rather than in antagonistic opposition.

After this first foray into theoretical economics, Tugan-Baranovsky turned his hand to the writing of biography, contributing short popular sketches of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and John Stuart Mill to a series entitled "Lives of Remarkable Men", produced by the publisher Pavlenkov. In these roughly 80-page books Tugan-Baranovsky was highly critical of Proudhon for his lack of internal consistency, stylistic obscurity, lack of imagination, and hypocritical support of the regime of Louis Napoleon. He was much more sympathetic to Mill, hailing the economist as one who "more than anyone else helped the spread throughout the civilized world of a right understanding of the spirit of contemporary science, based on the study of nature."

Following the intellectual example of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

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