http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Propaganda/Threat_Inflation.html

The big threat featured in the Cold War years was that posed by the Soviet Union, which at least referred to the challenge of a serious rival on the global scene. But even here, the threat was misread and hugely inflated. The Soviet Union was always a conservative and defensive-minded regional power, its reach beyond its near neighbors tentative, reactive, and weak. It never posed a threat to the United States and constantly sought accommodation with the real (U.S.) superpower-its real threat was that it offered an alternative development model and supported resistance to the global thrust of U. S. imperialism.

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/2915.html

The faculty at Bard College , a liberal arts school at Annandale , NY , includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology. But at Bard College no one is laughing, least of all the occupant of the chair, Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that U.S. criticism of communism was the product of hysteria. His views resemble those of Hiss, and he's not lonely. Hard as it may be for outsiders to imagine, a lingering affection for communism remains part of American university life.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/78/P40/

I can’t argue with you about the book if you do’nt know what’s in it. I certainly agree with your view of Soviet communism. My point, however is that the Soviet Union was never a threat to Western capitalism. It was to weak, too backward, and too incapable of flexibility. Indeed, Soviet communism had more in common with tzarist political culture than with anything that pre-1917 socialists had in mind. The Soviet experience redefined socialism in the popular mind because, as they insisted it was “real, existing socialism.”

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Summaries/V109I4P44-1.htm

...Nowadays, instead, we are told by our historical and political revisionists that the Soviet Union was never a threat in the first place, but a paper tiger conjured up by "cold warriors" or by the military-industrial complex...

http://www.silverback.org/links/jmleonearticles/leaders.htm

It's heartening to know that liberals are hard at work attempting to diminish the importance of the Cold War by stating that the Soviet Union was never a threat to American interests. Some liberals even go so far as to say there never was any such thing as the Cold War. This astounding rhetoric may be hard to swallow for most people, but through repetition, liberals are convincing the weak-minded among us that the Russians were misconstrued as aggressors by the right-wing military industrial establishment. By the Left's account, my father's tall tales of drills in elementary school of hiding under his desk to "protect" himself from a thermonuclear blast are all lies as well. Maybe the elementary school teachers were in on the right-wing conspiracy to scare everyone also.

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/005779.php

In its Jan. 1, 1990 edition, Time magazine's Senior Editor
Strobe Talbott explained why the newsweekly had selected
as its "Man of the Decade" not Ronald Reagan,
who had broken the back of the Soviet Union and brought
down the Berlin Wall, but Mikhail Gorbachev.

Wrote Talbott, "A new consensus is emerging that the
Soviet threat is not what it used to be. The real point
however, is that it never was. The doves in the
Great Debate of the past 40 years were right all along."