Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky was born on 8 January 1865 in the village of Solone in the Kupyansky Uyezd of the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine).

[3] Tugan-Baranovsky attended high school in the cities of Kiev and Kharkov, developing an early affinity for philosophy, including the works of Immanuel Kant.

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.

[6] 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.

[7] 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.

[9] 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.

[12] He then returned to Russia, spending two more years at work in St. Petersburg on a substantial tome of business cycle theory, Industrial Crises in Contemporary England: Their Causes and Influences on the Life of the People.

[12] The achievement of this academic rank allowed Tugan-Baranovsky to gain employment in academia, accepting an appointment as a Privatdozent (lecturer) at St. Petersburg University.

[17] In December of that year he published a seminal article of Marxist theory, frequently reprinted, "The Significance of the Economic Factor in History", which drew the attention and written replies of leading narodnik critics such as Vasily Vorontsov and Nikolay Mikhaylovsky.

[18] In April 1900, Tugan-Baranovsky participated in the organizational meeting to create the Iskra newspaper, which later became the basis for the creation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

[19] While he consistently expressed Marxist economic and political ideas in this period, there is no indication that Tugan-Baranovsky ever joined the underground Social Democratic movement which was then emerging in Russia.