Kondratievshchina

Kondratiev's work

Kondratiev was an economist known internationally for his work on business cycles. The theory of long waves he set out in the 1920s held that capitalist economies repeat upswings and downswings over cycles of several decades, and it settled under the name Kondratiev waves. At the same time he carried out practical research for the People's Commissariat of Finance and in agriculture, drawing up plans for agricultural development grounded in market conditions.

In policy he stood with the balance position: that maintaining proportion between industry and agriculture and respecting the peasant's market incentive while developing gradually served the growth of the national economy as a whole. In practice this position combined with Gosplan's genetic method.

Making of the label

His name appeared as an object of criticism from 1928, and at the Conference of Marxist Agrarians in December 1929 Stalin defined Kondratievshchina, along with Chayanovshchina, as an agency of imperialism and an ideology of the kulaks. Afterwards any account defending market balance and gradual development was treated as counter-revolutionary wrecking.

Criticism of the long-wave theory included a theoretical charge. The hypothesis that capitalism enters an upswing again after a periodic downturn was read as denying capitalism's final crisis. That reading later became a matter of dispute within Western Marxism as well.

The case and reassessment

Kondratiev was arrested in the Labour Peasant Party case in 1930, convicted, and confined in the Suzdal political isolator. He continued to write there, producing manuscripts, and was shot in 1938.

His long-wave hypothesis continued to be discussed abroad. Schumpeter developed the concept in combination with technological innovation, and in the later twentieth century it was drawn on in world-systems theory, regulation theory, and research on techno-economic paradigms. He was rehabilitated in the USSR after 1987 and his surviving manuscripts were published. That the label Kondratievshchina removed not only particular scholars but the economic method of treating market conditions at all is noted as a gap in later Soviet economics.