“The rhythm of long cycles”
Nikolai Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development
A week after demonstrators took to the streets of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) on February 23, 1917 (by the old Julian calendar), Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and a provisional government took power. It was made up of moderates from the Constitutional Democratic Party and some representatives from more radical groups, including the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. The SRs, as they were known, were agrarian socialists whose support was based in the peasantry. Whereas Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was committed to state control of agriculture and industry, the SRs’ economic vision of the future was based on expanding Russia’s selfgoverning village communities of peasant households, known as mirs. In May 1917 Viktor Chernov, a veteran SR, became minister of agriculture in the provisional government, which coexisted uneasily with new workers’ councils (soviets) that had sprung up in Petrograd and other cities. One of Chernov’s advisers was a young economist named Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev.
The task facing Chernov, Kondratiev, and their colleagues was a forbidding one. In large parts of the country, acute food shortages that had contributed to the collapse of the tsarist regime were continuing. One of the provisional government’s first acts was to introduce bread rationing and establish a state monopoly on the procurement and distribution of grain. The question of what to do about the land was another pressing issue. Many peasants were demanding a breakup of the great feudal estates. In some places, they were taking matters into their own hands, seizing the land and dividing it among themselves.
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