This isn’t to let experts, especially expert communities, off the hook for massive failures of insight. While no one Soviet expert in the 1970s could predict the fall of the USSR by 1991, the hardening of expert opinion around the opposite view—that the collapse of the Soviet state was practically impossible—is a sizable error in judgment that should haunt that field. (Unfortunately, it does not; for twenty years, most Russia specialists have shied away from examining each other’s mistakes.)
