Not the most recognizable name in the Soviet Union’s 1930’s bloodletting, Kondratiev — also transliterated Kondratieff — was a pre-Keynesian economist of some note, who had a prominent hand in the fledgling USSR’s early agricultural direction. Thus far goes the portfolio of many a forgotten academic or bureaucrat shot by Stalin. But Kondratiev made a contribution still much remembered — and one that might just be due to re-emerge from its occult hibernation. In a series of 1920’s papers, Kondratiev worked out the theory that capitalism had 50-to-60-year economic supercycles. Though not strictly the first to so hypothesize, he put...