They are trapped within a bad framework.

There was a lot of this kind of shit with "Soviet Studies" too.

Back in the day, these are the same people who would be informed by the New York Times about the innerworkings of Moscow, and would have no idea that there even was a Holodomor. Nor that ethnic were battling with other ethnic groups in the Comintern to institutionally discriminate against other ethnic groups. Poles, Muskovites, Kyevan Rus, Khazacks, Georgians, everybody was kind of at each other's throats.

The Soviet Union basically fell because the Estonians discovered the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in a museum in DC, and realized that the Russians never prevented the Nazis from invading, but were actually allowed by Hitler to invade and occupy Estonia because of the public alliance that no in the East heard about in time.

If you had asked anybody in the US in 1984 "How long does the Soviet Union have left?", not a single solitary soul would have told you "5 years". The most optimistic, Reaganite, anti-Communist would have said "50 years".