Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev

Who he is and his times

Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev was born in 1892 in the village of Galuevskaya, Kineshma district, Kostroma Governorate, into a peasant family. In 1906, together with his friend Pitirim Sorokin, the future famous sociologist, he was expelled from a teachers’ seminary for propagating the views of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Kondratiev then studied at St Petersburg University and even before the revolution became a notable specialist in agrarian economics and the food question.

In 1917 Kondratiev, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was elected to the Constituent Assembly and served as deputy minister of food in the last cabinet of the Provisional Government. He chose not to emigrate. In 1919 he left the Socialist Revolutionary Party and, in his own words, recognized the need to accept the October Revolution and work with the Soviet government. In 1922 his monograph The Grain Market and Its Regulation during the War and the Revolution, written in 1919, was published.

In October 1920 Kondratiev became one of the organizers of the Institute for the Study of National Economic Conditions and remained its director until 1928. According to V. V. Simonov and N. K. Figurovskaya, it was the world’s first specialized research institute for the study of economic conditions. In January 1923, at the insistence of the deputy people’s commissar of finance G. Ya. Sokolnikov, the institute was transferred from the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem) to the People’s Commissariat of Finance (Narkomfin).

At the same time Kondratiev headed the directorate of agricultural economics and planning of the Narkomzem of the RSFSR, represented the commissariat in the agricultural section of Gosplan and taught at the Petrovskaya (from 1923, Timiryazev) Academy. In 1924–1925 he travelled to the United States and European countries, where he established contacts with leading researchers of business conditions. His works were translated, and he himself was a member of a number of foreign learned societies.

Main ideas

Kondratiev’s best-known idea is the long cycles of economic conditions. Studying 100–150-year series of prices, interest rates, wages, and coal and pig iron output in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, he concluded that in the capitalist economy, besides the ordinary industrial cycles lasting several years, there are long waves of upswing and downswing lasting about half a century. He set out his first observations in the book The World Economy and Its Conditions during and after the War (1922), and the full theory in the article The Major Economic Cycles (1925). An abridged English translation appeared in 1935 in a Harvard University journal.

The second line is the theory of foresight. Kondratiev distinguished the foresight of individual events, which is almost impossible; the foresight of regularly recurring phenomena such as cycles; and the foresight of general development trends, which he considered the most attainable. From this followed a conclusion for planning: regulation and planning can be rational only on the basis of knowledge of the real dynamic processes in the economy. The plan, according to Kondratiev, is above all a system of well-founded forecasts and measures, not a set of assignments. As L. M. Yablonskaya and M. S. Rychkova recount, Kondratiev linked the philosophical basis of this programme to the principle of Auguste Comte: to know in order to foresee, and to foresee in order to govern. He distinguished laws describing stable relationships in a state of equilibrium from laws of dynamics that operate when equilibrium is disturbed and qualitative shifts occur. In the article The Problem of Foresight (1926) he formulated the task of gradually mastering the spontaneous forces of economic life and subordinating it to the conscious direction of the state — but through knowledge of these forces, not in defiance of them.

Hence his principles of long-term planning. He proposed first analysing objective trends and the spontaneous development of the economy, then designing measures of state intervention, and only after that determining the final prospects, taking into account how effective these measures are. A long-term plan, in his view, should be freed as far as possible from detailed numerical calculations, while specificity is needed in operational plans. He considered the basis of nationwide planning to be generalized prospects and long-term trends, with a minimum of quantitative indicators and a maximum of initiative at the lower levels of the economy.

Kondratiev opposed what he called “statistical fetishism” — the pursuit of figures and growth rates for their own sake. He wrote that a significant part of planning work apparently goes on without any effect, and that the country is being swamped by a kind of spontaneous flood of planning work itself. He saw the purpose of regulation in balancing the interests of sectors and social groups that clash on the market, in equilibrium between industry and agriculture, accumulation and consumption.

His early idea of negotiated prices is also characteristic. As early as 1919, at the height of War Communism, Kondratiev proposed resolving the conflict between agricultural marketing cooperatives and consumer cooperatives not by administrative price-setting but by agreement between them. In his words, as retold by Simonov and Figurovskaya, this was not about a price fundamentally different from the market price, but about more systematic, accurate and fair calculations into which the state introduces an element of rationality. The combination of a market price with public rules for its formation runs through all his works.

What became of the ideas in practice

On agrarian questions Kondratiev defended the development of peasant farming through voluntary cooperation and greater marketability. He believed that forms of land use could not be prescribed against local conditions, and that producer cooperation should grow gradually — out of marketing, supply and credit cooperatives. In the mid-1920s he advocated lifting restrictions on prosperous farms approaching the farmer type, since it was they that supplied marketable grain. This position is what made him the main target of political criticism.

Kondratiev’s main practical work in the planning bodies was the long-term plan for the development of agriculture and forestry for 1923–1928, later called the “Kondratiev five-year plan”. In the autumn of 1923 it began to be prepared by the planning commission of Narkomzem under I. A. Teodorovich; the work was carried out by Kondratiev and N. P. Oganovsky. In December 1923 the chairman of the Gosplan of the RSFSR, G. M. Krzhizhanovsky, ordered materials on agricultural planning to be prepared urgently, and on 17 January 1924 the report Prospects for the Development of Agriculture was heard in the agricultural section of Gosplan.

The discussion was harsh. Critics led by L. N. Kritsman tried to cast doubt on both the professional and the political integrity of the authors. Nevertheless, after Kondratiev’s report of 4 July 1925 the final version of the plan was approved by the Gosplan presidium. According to Simonov and Figurovskaya, in 1925 Kondratiev’s approach — a plan-forecast with a minimum of directive figures — still seemed convincing to the presidium.

By 1927 the situation had changed. In the article Critical Notes on the Plan for the Development of the National Economy, published in the journal Planovoe Khozyaystvo (1927, No. 4), Kondratiev examined Gosplan’s draft five-year plan. He pointed to the overall imbalance of the plan and to the gap between the targets for industry and the capacity of agriculture, and warned of a food shortage by the end of the five-year period. Reality, he wrote, would in any case force the prospects to be reduced to what is realistically achievable, possibly at the cost of a heavy reckoning for the mistakes.

The response was political. S. G. Strumilin called Kondratiev an “epigone of Narodism”, and G. E. Zinoviev, in the journal Bolshevik (1927, No. 13), called him the author of a “manifesto of the kulak party”. The label “ideologist of the kulaks” became fixed in party documents. According to Kondratiev himself, by the end of 1927 he was already in disgrace. In 1928 he was removed from the leadership of the Conjuncture Institute, and on 19 June 1930 he was arrested.

What worked and what did not

From a scholarly point of view, what worked above all was the very formulation of the task of studying economic conditions. The Conjuncture Institute systematically collected and published data on prices, trade, production and finance, issued reviews and built indicators by which the state of the economy could be judged without relying on agencies’ reports. It was an information system independent of those executing the plan — exactly what Soviet planning later lacked.

The theory of long cycles gained worldwide recognition. Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “Kondratiev waves” and linked them to waves of technological innovation, and this line of research continues to this day. However, the empirical status of long waves remains disputed: economists do not agree on whether they exist as a regularity or are an artefact of how short data series are processed. For planning this means that long waves are useful as a framework for thinking but poorly suited as a basis for specific calculations.

The 1927 warning about food difficulties was, unfortunately, borne out. As early as 1927–1928 a grain procurement crisis broke out, and the forced industrialization and collectivization of the early 1930s were accompanied by the mass famine of 1932–1933. The causes of this catastrophe are more complex than an imbalanced plan and include forced grain procurements and the destruction of peasant farming, but historians recognize the general thrust of Kondratiev’s warning as correct.

The political bet on dialogue did not work. Kondratiev assumed that arguments and data could influence the choice of course, and he published open criticism until the end of the 1920s. But the agrarian policy he proposed — the development of commercial peasant farming and voluntary cooperation — was rejected in favour of wholesale collectivization. The plan-forecast with a minimum of directive indicators gave way to the plan-as-command. The idea that a plan should be a form of foresight returned to Soviet practice only in the 1960s, when the Economic Research Institute of Gosplan (NIEI) began to treat forecasting as a pre-planning stage of work.

Debate and criticism

In the dispute over planning method Kondratiev was one of the main “geneticists”, alongside V. A. Bazarov and V. G. Groman. The teleologists, above all Strumilin, objected that a socialist economy is not obliged to submit to established trends, and that the goals of the plan themselves change the conditions for achieving them. In response to Kondratiev’s demand to set only realistic prospects in the plan, Strumilin wrote that goals cannot be abandoned merely because their fulfilment is not guaranteed. This exchange of 1927 became the symbol of the whole dispute.

The dispute ended in a criminal case. According to researchers, the “Working Peasant Party” was a fictitious organization invented by the OGPU investigation; many independent agrarian specialists and economists were arrested in the Working Peasant Party case, including A. V. Chayanov, N. P. Makarov and L. N. Litoshenko. In March 1931 Kondratiev was brought as a witness to the Menshevik Union Bureau trial; according to V. N. Uimanov, his testimony was used by the prosecution to confirm links between “counter-revolutionary” organizations. In January 1932, at a closed trial, he was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.

Kondratiev served his sentence in the Suzdal political isolation prison, where he continued his scholarly work as far as conditions allowed; there he wrote the book The Main Problems of Economic Statics and Dynamics, which remained unfinished. When his term was coming to an end, he was sentenced again. On 17 September 1938 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to death, and on the same day the sentence was carried out at the Kommunarka shooting ground near Moscow.

In 1963 Kondratiev was rehabilitated, but this decision was not published in the USSR. He was rehabilitated a second time, together with Chayanov, on 16 July 1987. On 30 November 1990 the USSR Council of Ministers adopted a resolution to perpetuate his memory and to hold an international conference for the centenary of his birth. A prize named after Kondratiev was established, and his works were republished.

The scholarly criticism of Kondratiev is not reducible to political labels. Marxist opponents pointed out that the theory of long waves substitutes statistical regularities for the analysis of class contradictions, and economists of later generations doubted the reliability of the data on which it was built. On the other hand, free-market advocates may reproach him for his faith in state regulation: he wanted not the abolition of the plan but a plan grounded in knowledge of the market. Finally, his model, like that of the other geneticists, remained an expert one: the question of who chooses the goals of development was not specifically raised in it.

Legacy today

Today Kondratiev’s name is firmly established in the world economic literature. Long waves are discussed in connection with technological revolutions, crises and changes of technological paradigms; in Russia this tradition is especially strong in research on long-term forecasting. The prize and scholarly conferences named after him continue the tradition restored in 1990.

In the USSR itself the return was slow. According to V. A. Pchelkin, the materials of the debates of the 1920s remained closed, and only after the Twentieth Party Congress was the Economic Research Institute of Gosplan able to obtain them on special request. Specialists who developed national economic forecasting in the 1960s drew on the arguments of the geneticists but could not openly cite their authors until the rehabilitation of 1987.

For the history of planning Kondratiev matters not so much for his theory of cycles as for his understanding of the plan as a system of well-founded foresight. His demand to limit the long-term plan to a few generalized indicators, leaving maximum initiative to the lower levels, in essence describes framework planning, in which the state sets directions and the economy acts independently. His criticism of the “spontaneous flood of planning work itself” sounds modern wherever strategies and programmes multiply faster than results.

At the same time his fate shows what happens to independent expertise when its conclusions diverge from the political line. The institute that collected independent data was deprived of its director, the critic of the plan was declared an enemy, and his forecast, which proved correct, had no influence on the course. This is an argument that the independence of measurement and expertise must be secured institutionally rather than left to the goodwill of those who make decisions.

Links between ideas

Whom the author argued with, whose ideas they developed, whom they answered and whose fate they shared. All links are on the shared graph. Graph of ideas

• Gleb Krzhizhanovsky

  Practice and institutions ←

  In 1923 Krzhizhanovsky commissioned an agricultural plan; Kondratiev’s plan was approved by the Gosplan presidium in 1925.

• Stanislav Strumilin

  Direct response →

  Strumilin answered Kondratiev’s 1927 “Critical Notes” by saying that goals are not abandoned even when success is not guaranteed.

• Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman

  Shared fate ←

  Arrested in 1930; Kondratiev was brought as a witness to the Menshevik Union Bureau trial, at which Groman was convicted.

Timeline

1. 1892

   Born in the village of Galuevskaya, Kostroma Governorate

2. 1917

   Deputy minister of food of the Provisional Government; elected to the Constituent Assembly

3. 1920

   One of the organizers and director of the Conjuncture Institute (October)

4. 1922

   The World Economy and Its Conditions during and after the War (Mirovoe khozyaystvo i ego kon’yunktury vo vremya i posle voyny)

5. 1925

   The Major Economic Cycles (Bol’shie tsikly kon’yunktury); the Gosplan presidium approves the long-term plan for agriculture and forestry

6. 1927

   Critical Notes on the Plan for the Development of the National Economy (Kriticheskie zametki o plane razvitiya narodnogo khozyaystva); campaign against the “ideologist of the kulaks”

7. 1930

   Arrested in the Working Peasant Party case (19 June)

8. 1932

   Sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment; Suzdal political isolation prison

9. 1938

   Sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and shot (17 September)

10. 1987

    Rehabilitated together with A. V. Chayanov (16 July); first, unpublished rehabilitation in 1963

Key works

• 1922The Grain Market and Its Regulation during the War and the Revolution (Rynok khlebov i ego regulirovanie vo vremya voyny i revolyutsii)
• 1922The World Economy and Its Conditions during and after the War (Mirovoe khozyaystvo i ego kon’yunktury vo vremya i posle voyny)
• 1924Foundations of the Long-Term Plan for the Development of Agriculture and Forestry (Osnovy perspektivnogo plana razvitiya sel’skogo i lesnogo khozyaystva), with N. P. Oganovsky
• 1925The Major Economic Cycles (Bol’shie tsikly kon’yunktury)
• 1926The Problem of Foresight (Problema predvideniya)
• 1927Critical Notes on the Plan for the Development of the National Economy (Kriticheskie zametki o plane razvitiya narodnogo khozyaystva)
• 1932–1938The Main Problems of Economic Statics and Dynamics (Osnovnye problemy ekonomicheskoy statiki i dinamiki), unfinished

Sources

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7. Альманах «Социальная эволюция и история» (sociostudies.org). Nikolai Kondratieff: In the Millstones of History. без даты
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Prepared from open sources. Dates, titles and quotations were checked against the source list at the bottom of the page; where sources disagree, the text says so.