Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kondratiev (/kɒnˈndrɑːtiɛv/); also Kondratieff; Russian: Никола́й Дми́триевич Кондра́тьев; (4 March 1892 – 17 September 1938) was a Russian Soviet economist and proponent of the New Economic Policy (NEP) best known for the business cycle theory known as Kondratiev waves.
Kondratiev became an early leading
figure of Soviet economics and promoted the NEP's system of small private free
market enterprises in the Soviet Union. Kondratiev's theory that Western capitalist
economies have long term (50-to-60-year) cycles of boom followed by depression gained
recognition inside and outside the Soviet Union, but has been largely rejected
by mainstream economists.
Kondratiev was condemned and imprisoned
in 1930 but continued to publish works until his execution during the Great
Purge in 1938.
Support of the
People's Commissariat
A member of the People's Commissariat of
Agriculture and a proponent of the Soviet New Economic Policy (NEP) supported
by Vladimir Lenin, Kondratiev was influential with writings about agriculture
and planning methodology. Influenced by his trips overseas, he advocated a market-led
industrialization strategy emphasizing export of agricultural produce to pay
for industrialization, following the Ricardian economics theory of comparative
advantage. He proposed a plan for
agriculture and forestry from 1924 to 1928. However, after the death of Lenin in
1924, Joseph Stalin, who favored complete government control of the economy,
took control of the Communist Party. Kondratiev's influence quickly waned.
According to the late Harvard
sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman, Kondratiev was reported to Soviet authorities
by a member of the University of Minnesota agriculture faculty in 1927 after a
visit to sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, a fellow Komi:
Kondratieff (sic), an agricultural
economist and student of business cycles, visited Minnesota in 1927 and stayed
with Sorokin. A number of prominent American scientists were pro-communist at
the time. One was a forester at the Ag campus where I had an office. He
upbraided me for associating with Sorokin and Kondratieff and told me he was
going to send a report about Kondratieff back to Russia. Later I learned that
Kondratieff was arrested immediately after returning to Russia from the trip to
see American universities. However, he was not given the final
"treatment" until the Stalinist purges of 1931.
Fall from USSR
directorship
Kondratiev was removed from the
directorship of the Institute of Conjuncture in 1928 and arrested in July 1930,
accused of being a member of a "Peasants Labour Party" (a
non-existent party invented by the NKVD). Convicted as a "kulak-professor"
and sentenced to 8 years in prison, Kondratiev served his sentence, from
February 1932 onwards, at Suzdal, near Moscow. Although his health deteriorated
under poor conditions, Kondratiev continued his research and decided to prepare
five new books, as he mentioned in a letter to his wife. Some of these texts
were indeed completed and were published.
His last letter was sent to his
daughter, Elena Kondratieva, on 31 August 1938. In September 1938 during
Stalin's Great Purge, he was subjected to a second trial, condemned to ten
years without the right to correspond with the outside world. However,
Kondratiev was executed at the Kommunarka shooting ground by firing squad on
the same day the sentence was issued. Kondratiev was 46 at the time of his execution.
Legacy
In the 1970s, increased interest in
business cycles led to the rediscovery of Kondratiev's work, including the
first-time publication of a complete English translation of his seminal article
"The Long Waves in Economic Life" in the journal Review
(Fernand Braudel Center) in 1979 (the article was originally published
in a German journal in 1926 and a partial English translation appeared in the
journal The Review of Economic Statistics in 1935). This
rediscovery of Kondratiev in English-speaking academia led to his theories
being extended for the first time beyond economics as, for example, political
scientists such as Joshua Goldstein and geographers such as Brian Berry extended
the concept of Kondratiev long waves into their own fields. However,
Kondratiev's theory remains controversial because, among other issues, of his
ideas about the periodical character of the replacement of basic capital goods
and the empirical possibility of coincidence in identifying long waves (i.e.
that long waves are simply an epiphenomenon).
Economists have largely rejected his long wave theory, and those who
accept some version of the idea disagree about the length of cycles and their
starting or ending points.
In 1987, the Soviet Union officially
rehabilitated Kondratiev. His collected
works were first translated into English by Stephen S. Wilson in 1998. In 1992,
on the centenary of his birth, the International Foundation N.A. Kondratiev was
founded at the hands of Russian academics, Elena Kondratieva and Italian
economist Giancarlo Pallavicini, at the time the first Western advisor to the
Russian government for the reform of the economy, appointed vice president,
along with Yurji Jacovetz, and Leonid Abalkin president.
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