I TOLD YOU SO, YOU F***KING FOOLS: ‘In the End I Was Right:’ How a Harvard Historian Helped Reagan Topple Soviet Communism.

Fortunately for America and for those under the jackboot of Soviet Communism, there were some who saw past the propaganda to the cruel truth. Among them was [Richard] Pipes, a historian of Russia who also served the U.S. government during the Ford and Reagan administrations.

After Pipes first visited the Soviet Union, in 1957, he wrote a colleague: “All the buildings on the streets were in a state of disrepair, the gateways crumbling, the façades patched up, the courtyards invisible for the mud which covered them. … Everything made the impression of being decayed or dead, even the people walking on the streets, somberly and paying no attention to each other. … I found it difficult to suppress the tears as I viewed about me the effects of 40 years of Soviet rule which had exacted such suffering from the population.”

Pipes later recalled it: “in Leningrad everyone looked gloomy and did not look at each other but seemed deep in their own thoughts. Because one could be executed under Stalin merely for an association with someone deemed guilty of counterrevolution, the only reasonable defense was to have nothing to do with other people.”

Daly quotes Pipes in 1996 summing up his own contribution: “Whereas the profession as a whole regarded the Soviet Union as an essentially popular and stable regime, I saw it as an unpopular and weak regime, which we ought to press very hard. That was very much a minority view, but I think that in the end I was right. Sound, stable popular regimes don’t collapse suddenly, as the Soviet Union did.”

The preference cascaded rather spectacularly back then, much to the chagrin of the DNC-MSM.

(Classical reference in headline.)