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Abstract. The topic of discussion is a direct continuation and logical development of our main issue: its subject is shifted from the eve of historical changes as such and the optics of the “future in the past” to those development scenarios that, for one reason or another, were not realized. The panelists were asked questions focused on various aspects of the “unfulfilled tomorrow” problem: what does counterfactual analysis give for the historian, what are its heuristic possibilities and methodological limitations? How strongly is the historical process and its understanding influenced by unrealized scenarios, recorded in sources as prophecies and warnings unheard by contemporaries, but which have become the object of attention post factum? How significant are the problems of inflated expectations, unfulfilled hopes and fatal mistakes in the context of intellectual history, cultural anthropology and genre of historical biography: what place in the portrait gallery of history are the unsuccessful heroes, unrecognized geniuses, and failed arbiters of people’s fates? Our polemicists have expressed a wide range of points of view on the research significance of this issue and the prospects for such investigations, from optimistic to skeptical. The participants of the discussion also presented a variety of research cases, to which, in their opinion, the optics of the “future in the past” and the methodology of counterfactual modeling are applicable.
Keywords: temporal discourses, the future in the past, historical alternatives, counterfactual modeling, prognostics, the collapse of empires, the dialectic of continuity and gaps.