How Could Russia Have Developed without the Revolution of 1917?

This paper uses modern econometric approaches to program evaluation with one treated unit to predict how Russia could have developed without the Revolution of 1917. I construct the counterfactual for Russia for 1917–1938 using several variations of the synthetic control method, which is the preferred approach based on a number of placebo tests. My counterfactuals suggests that without the Revolution, Russia would probably have avoided the dramatic economic decline of the early 1920s and would have grown steadily throughout most of the 1920s. The predictions for the 1930s are less clear: while most specifications suggest that the counterfactual Russia would have reached a lower level of economic development than the Soviet Union, the results are sensitive to the choice of specification, and the placebo tests suggest that there is a lot of uncertainty about the results as the forecasting horizon becomes longer.