A father was serving an unfair prison sentence, thinking about his inevitable demise. Wondering if he might ever see his daughter again, he penned a moving last letter to her. “My sweet, darling Alyonushka,” the father, an intellectual and brilliant economist who fell out of favour with his government because of his views, wrote. “Read good books. Be a clever and a good little girl. Listen to your mother and never disappoint her. I would also be happy if you managed not to forget about me, your papa, altogether.”

It was August 1938 and soon the Stalinist government executed Nikolay Kondratyev. A pre-Keynesian economist, and sidelined by many 20th century economic thinkers, he is best known today for the 50-to-60-year economic super-cycles he identified in capitalist economies. To the dismay of the Soviet regime, he identified that the intermittent economic crises faced by the West did not lead to an inevitable implosion, but, instead, cleared historical debris for new cycles of growth.