From Russia, With a Really Big Wave Every 30 Years
The commodities super-cycle named for a murdered Bolshevik economist first outlived Stalin and now looks primed for Putin’s war.
Economics isn’t a mug’s game: Kondratieff’s theory will still be here after Putin, too.
Photographer: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty
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With Russian violence once more in the news, it’s time to return to the victim of a Soviet-era round of conflict. Nikolai Kondratieff, a Marxist revolutionary economist, fell foul of Stalin and was shot at the age of 46. But his concept of the “Kondratieff Wave” remains intact. In capitalist economies, his work showed that commodity prices tended to move in long cycles, with extended waves of rising prices followed by decades when prices moved horizontally.