Khrenovo school, meeting with P.Sorokin the idea of justice

The significant page of Kondratieff’s fate become his attending a parish school in the neighboring village of Khrenovo.

It was at Khrenovo parish school that he met and made friends with Pitirim Sorokin. Kondratieff revealed a mind sufficiently inquisitive for him to take to revolutionary ideas and to join the Socialist Revolutionaries. After twice being under arrest in Kineshma jail, Kondratieff left for Uman where he studied agriculture and horticulture in a local college, taking any job to earn his living.
Just in school he was being stood in defence of his convictions constantly. As P.Sorokin wrote describing the case the Kondratieff helped him to save his “special opinion”, “I could not wish the better friend in life and science. Together we finished the School, together went to seminary, together were arrested, together endured the scholar exam and together entered to the University”.

Khrenovo school.
Today at the fronton of the school placed the memorial desk
informing new generations about two famous sons of Russia – N.Kondratieff and P.Sorokin.
At 90-s y. in School was built museum devoted to them.

Giving the characteristic to main pre-revolutionary Russian dream, Sorokin pointed that they were tempted by the idea of social justice dramatically. “We studied good, but the more we knew, the more we saw and the more understood about unjustness of the existed order, the more we understood, the deeper and power became our protest, and the strongest became the wishing to help our brothers, hided peasant and worker”.

Peasant children of 1900-s: Nicolai Kondratieff – left, Pitirim Sorokin – right.
Photo RSAE