This study is an attempt to take a look at the figure of the great Russian economist Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kondratiev, on the 125th anniversary of his birth, from certain quite singular angles. One of the major acquired sources has been the “Kondràt’evščina” collection, the document published in 1930 by the “Communist Academy”, which had never been republished or translated into another language. This collection represents the most important leitmotifs of Soviet criticism on him; they also include an attack against the scholar’s background in his relation to the master M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky. This unfortunate attack became a pretext for “dusting off” the pamphlet written by Kondratiev in homage to the master Tugan-Baranovsky, a few years after his death, deducing some considerations on their privileged relationship. Finally, some of Kondratiev’s essential human traits have also been noted, highlighting certain aspects of his multifaceted personality, full of interests, even beyond economic and social disciplines.
The scope of this paper, therefore, is to present the scholar Kondratiev from perspectives unexplored in the existing literature, in order to create a more complete picture of what is known today, generally and almost exclusively centred on Kondratiev, as the theorist of “K cycles”.