(FORTUNE Magazine) – It would be tempting to sit back and gloat, or even cackle, over the continuing crisis of Communism, but some writers feel this response is inadequate. Some of us want vengeance. It is in the spirit of revanche that we offer up the following statements made about Communism in the last decade or so. Please do not write in to say that they could not possibly have been uttered by the highly intelligent sources cited, as we have the goods on every one. -- ''It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable.'' That is what Paul Samuelson wrote in the tenth edition of his textbook Economics. To be fair here, Paul took out ''vulgar'' in the 11th edition. In the 12th edition (co-authored with William D. Nordhaus and published in 1985), he took out the whole sentence but stuck in an absurd passage asking whether Soviet political repression was ''worth the economic gains'' (a question identified as ''one of the most profound dilemmas of human society''). -- Then there was the infamous question, asked in the 1981-82 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), about Ming and Maria, posited to be a couple of young ladies discussing whether there is more freedom in America or Communist China. The testees got to read their respective arguments, in which Ming leans hard on free medical care in China (''Can there be greater freedom than that?''). NAEP's correct answer was one nobly assuming that both girls have a point and it's all a matter of opinion. -- Writing in the New Yorker in 1984, just before Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed that things were going from desperate to hopeless, old reliable John Kenneth Galbraith found that the Soviet economy had been making ''great material progress.'' Ken's evidence: ''One sees it in the appearance of solid well- being of the people on the streets, the close to murderous traffic, the incredible exfoliation of apartment houses . . .'' But what is the Soviet secret? ''Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.'' -- It was then-Senator Charles Mathias Jr. of Maryland, ever a favorite of the Capitol press corps, who advised us in 1982 that the death of Brezhnev was bad news -- ''not because he was 'the devil we know,' but rather because he represented stability and will surely be followed by a less stable regime.'' We do not know Mathias's views on the present instability. -- ''One is uneasy hearing the President ((Reagan)) call Communism a 'bizarre chapter' of human history likely to be closed in the foreseeable future,'' wrote eminent Sovietologists F. Stephen Larrabee and Dimitri Simes in 1981, adding mysteriously that ''excessive optimism about an inevitable disintegration of the Communist regime in the U.S.S.R. is analytically unsound and has dangerous political implications.'' -- ''Students gained a greater respect for the peasants by actually taking part in farm labor and talking with them about the hardships of their life.'' This amazing formulation -- from a widely used high school text called Teaching About World Cultures -- refers to the deportation of 20 million relatively educated Chinese condemned to forced labor in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. -- What ever happened to the folks at Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates who went public in February 1981 (just after publication of the latest five-year plan) with a computer model showing a substantial upturn in Soviet GNP over the next five years, largely due to huge gains in agriculture? -- ''Except for small pockets of resistance to the Communist regime, the people have been truly converted.'' The author of those words (in 1986) was Stuart H. Loory, CNN bureau chief in Moscow, who asserted for good measure that the Soviet Communist Party would surely win in a truly free election. And we never even got a bet down.