This paper uses both correlational and experimental methods to explore the
power of counterfactual cognitions about the past to constrain judgments ab
out the future as well as policy preferences. Study 1 asked 47 specialists
on the Soviet Union to assess both the plausibility of controversial counte
rfactuals and the probability of controversial conditional forecasts. The r
esults reveal deep ideological schisms, with liberals much more likely than
conservatives to believe that Stalinism was not inevitable, that the Cold
War could have ended earlier, and that Gorbachev might have succeeded in de
mocratizing the Soviet Union if he had been a better tactician, among other
s. Reactions to these counterfactuals proved to be highly predictive of pos
itions that experts in early 1992 endorsed concerning the advisability of '
shock therapy', expanding NATO eastward, and economic aid to Russia. Study
2 manipulated the salience and plausibility of counterfactual scenarios con
cerning (a) why the Cold War ended as it did, and (b) how close the US and
USSR came to nuclear war. Changes in the counterfactual scenarios that non-
experts endorsed produced significant changes in their policy preferences i
n the direction suggested by the salient counterfactual. Experts, however,
were unswayed, often generating counter-arguments against dissonant counter
factuals. Taken together, the studies show that assumptions about what happ
ened in the missing control conditions of history are highly subjective, la
rgely theory-driven and profoundly consequential.