Long Waves In The Pre-Industrial Period: A Time Series Analysis of Soviet Researchers’ Data

Abstract

Kondratiev long cycle is generally treated as a phenomenon of a modern world economy. However, the existence of major cycles before the Industrial Revolution does not contradict the theoretical views of Kondratiev, the founder of the long-waves theory. We have discovered Kondratiev’s documents, which show him going farther back in history. The key question we are trying to answer is why are major cycles not associated with a pre-industrial economy? We also have at our disposal a number of unknown and little-known historiographical sources, which indicate that Soviet researchers cared about the existence of long cycles in the pre-industrial period. At the same time, Soviet scientists had done a tremendous amount of work to construct the time series on historical data of Russia. Using this data, we concluded that the existence of Kondratiev waves in the Russian Empire was very probable.