Nikolai Ziber

28 April] 1888) was a Ukrainian academic economist, professor and one of the first advocates of Marxism in Russian Empire, particularly in Kyiv.

N. I. Ziber was born on March 10 (22), 1844, in Sudak, in the Feodosiysky Uyezd of the Taurida Governorate of the Russian Empire.

In 1875, he resigned his position and went to Switzerland following dismissal of Mykhailo Drahomanov from the Kiev University and, subsequently, to London, England.

In Switzerland he was an editor of the Drahomanov's magazine "Hromada", while in London in 1881 he became personally acquainted with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

However, unlike Ziber, these revolutionary Marxists thought that, by the 1890s at least, capitalist industrialisation was far enough advanced to make a socialist revolution possible within the foreseeable future.