Nikolai Kondratiev is widely known in the world as the author of the theory of large cycles environment - long waves of economic dynamics, periodically shaking the world (Kondratiev cycles). Equally important are the theory and methodology of forecasting future planning, his contribution to the theory of agrarian.
Background
Nikolai Kondratiev was born on 4 March 1892 in the province of Kostroma, north of Moscow, in a peasant
family.
His life on the whole can be divided into 4 periods:
1) first 17 years – childhood, adolescence, youth – from 1892 to 1908; during these years he gained extensive experience, but didn’t get good education;
2) a ten-year period in St. Petersburg - from 1908 to 1918:
from 1911-1914 he is a student at the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University in the department of economics and
statistics. Among his teachers was Tugan-Baranowski, who passed to Kondratiev his interest in the problems of economic development. In the years of training he participated in student demonstrations. Repeatedly arrested, took an active part in the revolution of 1917. After graduation he worked on his home department. He was also a professor at a number of other educational institutions of St. Petersburg;
3) A twelve-year period in Moscow – from 1918 to 1930 where he headed the economic department of the Council of
Agricultural Cooperation and the Association of flax, also was a professor of the Institute of Cooperative Timiryazev Academy. Founder and headmaster of the Institute of Conjuncture (1920-1928), that became one of the world's leading centers of economic research at that time. Also Kondratiev was elected as a member of many international economic and statistical societies; he was acquainted personally or in correspondence with leading economists of his time - U.Mitchell, A.S.Kuznets, I.Fisher, Dzh.M.Keyns;
4) An eight-year period of imprisonment in Stalin's prisons, from 1930 to 1938. He was arrested and named as the head of the defunct underground declaring "Labor Peasant Party." In 1931 he was sentenced to eight years in prison. He wrote the last of his scientific works in Butyrskaya prison and Suzdal pre-trial prison. In 1938 - sentenced to death. Only in 1987 was rehabilitated.
Education
For an underground activity was arrested twice and then expelled from seminary. Also took 2-year education courses in St. Petersburg (1908-1911)
Diploma thesis: "Development of the economy Kineshma zemstvo in Kostroma".
Career
The range of Kondratev’s interests was extremely broad and deep: philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics, law, religion, history, statistics, logic, and science in general.
His research interests cover the following problems:
* regularity of static, dynamic and cyclical social genetics;
* study of "large" economic cycles or long waves conditions (later called Kondratiev cycles);
* theory of prevision;
* planning of the economy;
* market research;
* agrarian problems;
* sociology.
Kondratiev is the author of theory and methodology of predicting long-term planning in a transitional economy – he is a founder of the theory and practice of indicative (advisory) planning. "For" the combination of plan and market. "Against" the concepts of forced industrialization. Also he was interested the field of agrarian economy and government regulation of the grain market (in 1923-1925 he worked on a five-year plan for the development of Soviet agriculture).
Kondratiev waves (also called supercycles, great surges, long waves, K-waves or the long economic cycle) are described as sinusoidal-like cycles in the modern capitalist world economy. Averaging fifty and ranging from approximately forty eight to fifty five years, the cycles consist of alternating periods between high sectoral growth and periods of relatively slow growth. Unlike the short-term business cycle, the long wave of this theory is not accepted by current mainstream economics.
Nikolai Kondratiev was the first to bring idea of long waves to international attention in his book The Major Economic Cycles (1925). Later, in Business Cycles (1939), Joseph Schumpeter suggested naming the cycles "Kondratieff waves", in honor of the economist who first noticed them.
He provided theoretical basis for long-term cycles and the fact that the world economy (capitalism in particular) is
experiencing the ups and downs, crises. In these sphere he:
* revealed the presence of large cycles based on statistical material which led him to the justification of endogenous nature of long waves;
* formulated empirical regularities related to long cycles;
* gave a theoretical justification for the existence of cycles - the change and expansion of basic capital goods, which do not occur smoothly, but by jerks.
Statistical data, which demonstrated the existence of large cycles, includes data of England, France, USA, Germany from the end of XVIII century to the early 1920s:
* index of commodity prices,
* interest on capital,
* nominal wage,
* turnover of foreign trade,
* coal mining,
* consumption of fossil fuels,
* lead production,
* iron production.
The theory of long waves had a lot of followers. Another theory of long waves - an innovative theory. This theory was developed by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who was one of the first adopted and applied the idea of Kondratieff cycles. Apart Y.Shumpeter the followers of innovation trends in the theory of long waves are Simon Kuznets, Gerhard Mensch, Alfred Klaynkneht, Jacob Van Dyne.
Politics
Slogan "In struggle you take your rights!" ("В борьбе обретешь ты право свое!")
The program of the PSR was both democratic socialist and agrarian socialist in nature; it garnered much support amongst Russia's rural peasantry, who in particular supported their program of land-socialization as opposed to the Bolshevik programme of land-nationalisation (division of land to peasant tenants rather than collectivization in state management). Their policy platform differed from that of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Parties - both Bolshevik and Menshevik - in that it was not officially Marxist (though some of its ideologues considered themselves such); the SRs believed that the 'labouring peasantry', as well as the industrial proletariat, would be the revolutionary class in Russia.