Publication |
2009.
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Summary/Abstract |
S NIKOLAI KONDRATIEV SHIVERED before his executioners on a wintry Siberian morning in 1938, he could scarcely have imagined that, 71 years later, his name would be resurrected by a new generation of business theorists and management gurus seeking to understand the first Great Recession of the 21st century.
A prime mover behind Lenin's 1921 New Economic Policy, which briefly rehabilitated capitalism in order to save a young Soviet Union from imminent collapse, Kondratiev was an intellectual insurgent in a time and place where heresy could get one killed. Kondratiev theorized that economic activity took place in long waves: 50- or 60-year periods of creativity and growth followed by briefer contractions, after which the cycle would begin anew.
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