Hmm ... didn’t find it there either. I must have remembered wrong. I thought I had read it somewhere. He said something along the lines “nothing in Soviet Union works”. Here he says something similar - “The Soviet Union is a third-world country in every real sense–but a third-world country with 10,000 deliverable nuclear warheads. The country cannot feed itself. You cannot drive from one side of the country to the other on a paved road.”, but not about it collapsing.
When the Evil empire was brought down by Reagan, within months the media came up with a theme that everyone knew that it was going to collapse on it’s own anyway, and instantly in conversations, that theme became the smug saying of wisdom from everyone, a rewrite to erase Reagan and perhaps the biggest foreign policy/military success of all time, and based on a strategy that Reagan had worked and trained for, for decades.
Back then I spent about a year searching and searching for all those articles predicting that the Russian empire was going to collapse soon anyway, and I couldn’t find any of them, it is a myth.
The USSR was seen on the ascendancy until Reagan started challenging them and beating them globally, hacking at them globally, reversing Russian won/lost trends globally.
Reagan was a the man who said that the USSR could be defeated, and he did it in 8 years.