I’m sorry for not explaining that. Indeed, for all I know Juan Cole doesn’t consider it an insulting comparison.
Jerry Hough was a prominent Sovietologist (not a historian) who never missed an opportunity to be incandescantly wrong on the big picture but was gifted in defending himself by hiding behind his C.V. and his “expertise.” In 1991 — two years after the Berlin Wall fell — Hough declared “The belief that the Soviet Union may disintegrate as a country contradicts all we know about revolution and national integration throughout the world.”
He once explained that “”the Soviet leadership almost seems to have made the Soviet Union closer to the spirit of the pluralist model of American political science than is the United States.”
My favorite anecdote about Hough comes from Robert Conquest:
I remember at Columbia University more than twenty years ago Stephen Cohen saying to me, “There’s someone here who thinks Stalin only killed ten thousand people.” “No there isn’t,” I said confidently. Steve took me over and said, “Jerry, how many people did Stalin kill?” “Ten thousand or so.”
This anecdote comes from this essay by Conquest about the moral idiocy and myopia of “experts” during the Cold War. It remains one of the most devastating and illuminating essays I have ever read and one can almost feel the parallels to Cole and his crowd emanating from the pages.