Nikolai Kondratiev’s Biography

Nikolai Kondratiev’s Biography

Also known as: Kondratieff, Kontradieff, Kondratyev, and Kondratev.

1892

Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev was born on 17 March 1892, in Galuevskaya village in the Kostroma Guberniya into a very poor peasant family. During his school years at church and teachers’ schools – the typical way for children from poor families to receive their education, he took part in democratic activities as a member of the Socialist-revolutionary party (Esery) and was arrested twice, in 1905 and 1906.1

Because he was poor, Kondratiev was not able to study regularly in a secondary school of the highest grade, which would provide him the opportunity to enter university. The only way for him to get the necessary certificate was to pass all exams without attending classes. Kondratiev did pass all the exams and entered the St Petersburg University (Petrograd) (juridical faculty), and graduated in 1915.2

1915

The first Kondratiev publications appeared in his early years at the University: the article ‘The main doctrines of the social development laws’ (1914) being a profound survey of different concepts of social development. His first book was based on his thesis, and appeared in 1915; it was a detailed survey of the economy of the Kinishma district of Kostroma Guberniya2. In spite of the heavy workload of his studies at the University, Kondratiev continued his political activities, mainly teaching groups of workers. For a democracy-minded member of the Russian intelligentsia to contribute to the social and economic literacy of the working class was well-received. He took part in the anti-monarchy demonstrations during the so called Romanovs’ days – a celebration of the 300-year anniversary of the House of Romanovs – and finally was arrested. After graduation he was recommended to prepare himself for possible professorship, but he decided to combine his scientific work with practical activities and entered the economic section of the Petrograd Union of Zemstvos during world war one – a public organization for social assistance for the wounded.

In pre-revolutionary Russia there were many macro-economic social problems, such as agrarian and land issues. That is where Kondratiev focused. The Russian Provisional Government was established after the abdication of the Czar. Kondratiev actively worked in the State Food Committee as its Vice-Chairman, in the Commission on Agrarian Reform, and in the Central Land Committee.

1917

In December 1917 he became a member of the Constituent Assembly (Duma) representing Kostroma Guberniya. Kondratiev hardly protested against the dissolution of the Duma in January 1918 by the Bolsheviks. He did however sharply criticize the Bolsheviks’ policy in general and that of the food provision in particular and blamed them for the famine and disorganization of the economy. At the start of 1918 Kondratiev moved to Moscow.3

1920

Analysis of the market of agricultural goods became an integral part of a broad stream of Kondratiev’s research on economic theory. The latter formed the main research line for him, as well as for the Conjuncture Institute founded in 1920 and headed by Kondratiev. It was the first scientific institute in the country that analyzed economic conjuncture (theory) in the USSR, capitalist countries in general and price fluctuations in particular. The activities of the institute were characterized by combining high level theoretical and methodological analysis with practical consideration aimed at a solution of the economic policy issues.4

Works of the Institute were widely known and highly evaluated by John Maynard Keynes, Mitchell, Fisher and other prominent economists of the period. Kondratiev’s personal contribution to economics was fully acknowledged and he was elected as a member of several well-known foreign scientific societies, including the American Economic Association, the American Association of Agricultural Economics, the Royal Economic Society, the Royal Statistical Society, etc.

1922

The first part of the 1920s was rather quiet and successful period in his life, but nevertheless political struggle did not permit him to become a scholar. In 1922 in an event which foreshadowed his ultimate demise he was arrested and charged with counter-revolutionary activity as a member of the so-called ‘Union for Liberation’. He spent some months in a concentration camp.

1924

In 1924 Kondratiev made a long trip abroad (June 1924 through January 1925): to the USA, Great Britain, Canada and Germany. His aim was to study the organization of agricultural production and policy in developed countries and on the world market and its potential from the point of view of USSR export prospects. We from letters that Kondratiev did cross pollinate his ideas with Wesley Mitchell and the NBER. Mitchell also wrote to him: “I hope heartily that you will take every opportunity to publish in English, French, or German, so that not only I but many others may profit by your contribution.”5

The USSR was in the midst of its first five year planning program in which Kondratiev was very vocal about his differing perspective. In 1924-25 it was not the basic principles of the plan but rather the way he thought the plan needed to be operationalized which brought considerable criticism. In one publication there had been used the term ‘kondratievshchina’. Conflating Kondratiev’s name with state sponsored capitalism (or cooperative capitalism). Unbowed, Kondratiev principles of planning remained unshaken. His shine began to dull as a result.

1926

The period from 1922 to the beginning of 1926 has been identified as Kondratiev’s most influential from the economic decision-making point of view. In the mist of all this in 1926 the major results of his investigation were presented in his report ‘Long Cycles of conjuncture’ delivered at the Institute of Economics in February. Now well-known as the foundation of the theory of long cycles, this report attracted a lot of attention and came in for a great deal of criticism particularly at a time where he was already taking damage for his input into the five year plan.

Kondratiev’s only paper devoted to Long Cycles which would get eventually become published in English. This occurred only with this one instance during his lifetime. The paper was initially translated into a 1926 German article published in the academic periodical: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. (FN6 Becomes: In 1933, when the Nazis gained power in Germany, the last editor of the Archive and half of the editorial staff of the journal were forced to emigrate and the journal ceased to exist.) That article would then be translated into English in a heavily abridged article by W.F. Stolper of Harvard University for The Review of Economic Statistics (Vol XVII, No. 6, Nov 1935).6

Below see the only five graphs which Kondratiev actually published outside of Russia during his lifetime from the lone 1926 article. All of his writings would eventually be translated and published in 1998. Honestly almost no one who is talking about Long Waves today ever read any of that work, as outstanding as his work really was. To research his actual words I found only the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school of Business (Lippincott library) possess the complete set of four volumes published as his complete works in 1998. Not even the Library of Congress has the four volumes set! So little wonder misinformation continues to be published.

Commodity Prices UK, US and France
Interest Rates
wages in England
France Foreign Trade
Coal production & consumption
Commodity Prices UK, US and France
Interest Rates
wages in England
France Foreign Trade
Coal production & consumption

1927

In 1927 a much more acute discussion flared up. This concerned the five year plan of the economy and had a great impact on Kondratiev’s life as well as on the entire process of planning in the USSR. He stressed that a balanced economy was part and parcel of a stable development, the coordination of goals with the ways of achieving their realization being its crucial prerequisite. As applied to the major objective of the period industrialization it meant the necessity to coordinate industrial development with progress in agriculture. The latter is impossible unless the state allows the peasantry to labor for its own economic advantage. In this connection he pointed out the importance of the development of a consumer-goods industry that would involve the peasantry in market relations; the importance of a balanced price policy that would permit the peasantry to carry out production on a progressively increasing scale and thus expand the agricultural market and the export of agricultural goods.

In 1926-7 Kondratiev upheld these ideas in a number of articles, speeches, reports and papers to the higher authorities. In November 1927, an article by G. Zinoviev (famously portrayed in the movie Reds), a well-known political and party figure, and member of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks’ Party (1902-1926) appeared in the ‘Bolshevik’ journal. It contained political and ideological assessments of Kondratiev’s position and that of his adherents. This article in many respects determined the direction and character of future statements against Kondratiev and many others. Kondratiev’s views were called ‘the manifesto of the kulak party’, and he and many scholars and specialists were labelled ‘liberal and more acute names.

The major attack was directed against Kondratiev’s views on planning and regulation, his agricultural policy as well as his theory of long cycles. He was declared to be against industrialization and collectivization, against the poorest part of the peasantry, and ‘guilty’ of supporting kulaks and the restoration of capitalism. Even worse politically speaking was his utterance that it was impossible to indicate the exact date for the collapse of capitalism.

Until he was arrested in 1928 he would exchange economic data with the NBER which some think was why he lived for another 10 years in prison before being executed. He was a very well-known economist in the West during the 1920s and he was the only source for economic data for the Soviet Union. Some think that is why he was locked away from 1928 to 1938. His silence would in effect get the West to forget about him and his ideas.   

1928

In 1928 Kondratiev was dismissed from his post as Director of the Conjuncture Institute, and the latter ceased to exist. In July 1930 he was arrested. Kondratiev’s interrogator, Agranov was ‘one of the most feared Sadists in the Lubyanka prison’.7 Stalin took a keen personal interest in the arrest and trial proceedings relating to Kondratiev. In a letter to V.M. Molotov dated 2 August 1930; Stalin recommended that the testimonies of Kondratiev … should be sent to all the members of the Central Committee, calling them ‘documents of primary importance’. A few days later Stalin wrote of the “government” of Kondratiev-Groman’, and urged that the investigation into Kondratiev must be continued ‘very thoroughly and without haste’. Stalin also wrote in a letter to Molotov that it was now clear that the execution of Kondratiev, Yurovskii, and other leading ‘economist-scoundrels’ was absolutely necessary. Given such an attitude from Stalin it is somewhat surprising that Kondratiev survived for as long as he did after his arrest.8

1932

In January 1932 the closed trial in connection with the prosecution of the so-called ‘Labor-peasant Party’ took place, following the trials of the members of the ‘Industrial Party’ and ‘Menshevik-counter-revolutionaries’. Kondratiev was found guilty of sabotage in agriculture, implementation of bourgeois methods in planning and soon prisoner at Suzdal prison, near Vladimir. Kondratiev was sentenced to eight years solitary confinement.

Although in prison, Kondratiev did try to continue developing his work on long cycles. He did complete a volume on trends, but the fate of the manuscript is unknown. The book on methodology, ‘The Basic Problems of Economic Statics and Dynamics’, was saved but unfinished.

Unfortunately, at the end 1936 Kondratiev’s health became worse. There was not any hope for recovery. The opportunity to work was now denied him, and his impending blindness threatened to tear him away from his fragile and only connection with the outside world. In September 1938 The Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR found Kondratiev guilty of anti-Soviet activity in prison and condemned him to death. He was executed that day.

Kondratiev was rehabilitated twice later in the 20th century. During Khrushchev’s Thaw in 1963 the sentence of 1938 was repealed and in 1987, when Glasnost dawned upon the country, the sentence of 1932 was repealed as well. His wife Evgeniya Dorf (1893-1982) and daughter Elena (1925-1995), a well-known microbiologist, did their utmost to save Kondratiev’s papers and to publish them when the time did come. The four volume set of Kondratiev’s complete works titled The Works of Nikolai D Kondratiev (The Pickering Masters) published by Routledge in 1998 was largely the result of his wife and daughters having saved much of his writing, papers and publications.

This was a summary of Nikolai Kondratiev’s biography. Let’s now move onto his theory and why the world continues to remember this economist to this day.  Kondratiev-Theory-Influence/

  1. The Works of Nikolai D Kondratiev (The Pickering Masters).  Basic problems of Economic Statistics and Dynamics. Volume 1. Nikolai D. Kondratiev (Author), Edited by Natalia Makasheva, Warren J. Samuels and Vincent Barnett. Translated by Stephen S. Wilson. Publisher: ‎ Routledge (1998). Page xxvii.  ↩︎
  2. The Works of Nikolai D Kondratiev (The Pickering Masters).  Basic problems of Economic Statistics and Dynamics. Volume 1. Nikolai D. Kondratiev (Author), Edited by Natalia Makasheva, Warren J. Samuels and Vincent Barnett. Translated by Stephen S. Wilson. Publisher: ‎ Routledge (1998). Page xxvii. ↩︎
  3. The Works of Nikolai D Kondratiev (The Pickering Masters).  Basic problems of Economic Statistics and Dynamics. Volume 1. Nikolai D. Kondratiev (Author), Edited by Natalia Makasheva, Warren J. Samuels and Vincent Barnett. Translated by Stephen S. Wilson. Publisher: ‎ Routledge (1998). Page xxviii. ↩︎
  4. The Works of Nikolai D Kondratiev (The Pickering Masters).  Basic problems of Economic Statistics and Dynamics. Volume 1. Nikolai D. Kondratiev (Author), Edited by Natalia Makasheva, Warren J. Samuels and Vincent Barnett. Translated by Stephen S. Wilson. Publisher: ‎ Routledge (1998). Page xxix. ↩︎
  5. Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Economic Development, Long Cycles and Industrial Growth in Historical Context. Palgrave Macmillan; 1998. Author Vincent Barnett. Page 75. ↩︎
  6. The Review of Economics and Statistics (RESTAT) continues to be published. It covers applied economics and especially quantitative economics. It is edited at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. ↩︎
  7. Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Economic Development, Long Cycles and Industrial Growth in Historical Context. Palgrave Macmillan; 1998. Author Vincent Barnett. Page 191. ↩︎
  8. Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Economic Development, Long Cycles and Industrial Growth in Historical Context. Palgrave Macmillan; 1998. Author Vincent Barnett. Page 194. ↩︎