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Abstract. The article is the introduction to the “Main Issue” focused on the problem of historical retrospection and the aberrations that arise from the interpretation of historical facts, regardless of the analysis of the situation immediately preceding the event. The author argues thesis on the heuristic possibilities of the “future in the past” research optics, when the probability and significance of a historical phenomenon are assessed in relation to its threshold, eve as the point of transition of a set of events-causes into an event-effect. A look at the historical fact in the temporal projection in which the event was perceived by contemporaries, abstracting from the researcher’s knowledge of the real consequences of this event, allows us to see the object of study as a realized development scenario against the background of many unrealized possibilities, in the entirety of cause-and-effect relationships and in the correlation of patterns, accidents and the human factor. Considering an event from the point of its eve also provides an opportunity for a more complete understanding of the historical actors’ motives without the distorting effect following from an a priori view of realized historical scenarios as the most likely. The use of the “future in the past” research optics also provides grounds for revising the concept of “black swans” — anomalous and unpredictable events that radically changed reality and were post factum interpreted in capacity of objective laws — as a key marker of present day. It becomes obvious from the perspective of applying this approach, that similar events occurred in the past, but their perception by contemporaries was obscured in historical memory by later interpretations.
Keywords: the eve, retrospection, the future in the past, randomness and regularity, the human factor, “black swans”.