Jaap van Duijn and the daughter of Kondratieff

Yesterday we had the Kondratieff seminar of the Dutch association of investment analysts ( Vereniging van BeleggingsAnalisten) with Jaap van Duijn and me as speachers.


Jaap van Duijn started his story with his encounter of the daughter Kondratieff as a result of somebody that had met her at an equestrian event where she also was in the jury. She was very interested in Jaap who had written so obviously with great respect about her father.

Jaap did get so the only picture of Kondratieff that was known (the picture above of course). Jaap gave a copy to Gerard ter Veer and that picture we used thankfully in our scripts about the Kondratieff wave.

In that time there was no glasnost yet and she had to be very careful. She managed to debunk some fantasy stories about Kondratieff. Nicolai is not at all exiled to Siberia but was imprisoned just outside Moscow. He was not so much a danger because he made his theory about a long wave of good and bad times but just he was an intellectual.

Kondratieff was a quite modest person despite his famous theories and the start of a Russian planning agency. He was not saying the prices followed a Kondratieff wave, it was Schumpeter that named the long wave after Nicolai. Kondratieff just suggested that there might be a long wave of prices. The Dutch de Wolf and van Gelderen had already earlier suggested an existence of a long wave (one of the reasons why the Dutch still have an above average interest in the Kondratieff wave).

He was quite young when he became under minister of agriculture and that is why he was so interested in agricultural prices on the long run.

Kondratieff was as scientist fors ome time at US universities, but he went back to Russia. That was not such a good idea because he first was sentenced to seven year jail and after those year the sentence was repeated and at long last they killed him in 1938.

Jaap was in 1992 in St Petersburg for the celebration of the 100th birthday of Kondratieff, but what stroke him most was how poor the university was. He got some manuscripts of the daughter of Kondratieff he had written in prison.

Further there was laughter when Jaap told how he started his research after the Kondratieff wave in 1974. He lent a book of a French scientist that was not lent out after 1959. That encouraged him to go further: the Kondratieff wave was definitely not over researched.