(FORTUNE Magazine) – Hey, fellows, guess what. It is now acceptable to say the Soviet Union was ''evil.'' It became so on Sunday, August 25, or at least that is when we first noticed this latest wonderful wobble in the zeitgeist. As is well known, the liberal establishment spent years excoriating Ronald Reagan for his characterization of the U.S.S.R. as an ''evil empire'' (in a 1983 speech). Liberal historian Henry Steele Commager called Ron's effort ''the worst presidential speech in American history.'' The New York Times editorialized that ''in the long run'' it was folly to think of superpower relationships in terms of good and evil. Times elder statesman James Reston said the speech was ''outrageous.'' The Boston Globe said Reagan was ''demonizing'' the Russians. The unifying thought behind these diatribes was a sappy non sequitur: Calling the Soviets evil would somehow prevent Ron from negotiating arms-control deals with them. On the 25th, your servant was recklessly risking strabismus by trying to read the New York Times ''Week in Review'' section while simultaneously eyeballing the David Brinkley show. Suddenly, there was Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev explaining to David in broken English that the Soviet Union never really was a union, adding: ''It was, rather, evil empire, as it was once put.'' A bit later, we found ourselves reading a long, thoughtful account of the empire's last days, written by Times Moscow correspondent Serge Schmemann and matter-of-factly referring along the way to ''the evil of ! Communism.'' A Nexis search tells us that politicians and op edsters of every stripe are now trotting out the E word a mile a minute in characterizing the collapsed Soviet system. The search turned up 120 articles in the post-coup period wherein ''evil'' appears within 30 words of ''Communism'' or ''Soviet.'' None of them are by erstwhile excoriators saying maybe Ron had a point.