Even as late as the early part of 1989, there was an acceptance that the Cold War was entrenched. The revolutions that washed through Europe that year were hardly expected by anyone. President Mitterand of France said only a couple of months before the Berlin Wall came down that he expected it "might" happen in the next twenty years.

The resulting changes, from the collapse of communism in Europe, and the 1991 Soviet coup and the collapse of the USSR, were quite unexpected by those who lived through them. Even the East Berliners who went down to the Wall following the fateful press conference on 8 Nov 1989 were not expecting what happened.

The NATO-Warsaw Pact standoff had lasted forty years, and there was no reason to believe it was going to change. Ructions had appeared in the past (1956 Hungary, 1967 Czechoslovakia, 1981 Poland) but the speed of what happened in 1989 took most observers, even in the intelligence communities, by surprise.

In general, the mainstream opinion in the West was that although the USSR had seen better days, a wholesale collapse, let alone a more or less peaceful one was not in the cards.

One of the bestsellers throughout the West in 1987 was Paul Kennedy's massive survey history Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Based upon secondary source literature, open-source governmental data, and his own analysis, Kennedy proposed that great powers collapse because of imperial overstretch and the USSR was facing an acute problem. Kennedy's conclusion is worth quoting at length here:

However one assesses the military strength of the USSR at the moment, therefore, the prospect of it being only the fourth or fifth among the great productive centers of the world by the early twenty-first century cannot but worry the Soviet leadership, simply because of the implications for long-term Russian Power

This does not mean that the USSR is close to collapse, any more than it should be viewed as a country of almost supernatural strength. It does mean that it is facing awkward choices. As one Russian expert has expressed it, “The policy of guns, butter, and growth- the political cornerstone of the Brezhnev era- is no longer possible.. even under the most optimistic scenarios.. the Soviet Union will face an economic crunch far more severe than anything it encountered in the 1960s and 1970s.” It is to be expected that the efforts and exhortations to improve the Russian economy will intensify. But since it is highly unlikely that even an energetic regime in Moscow would either abandon “scientific socialism” in order to boost the economy or drastically cut the burdens of defense expenditures and thereby affect the military core of the Soviet state, the prospects of an escape from the contradictions which the USSR faces are not good. Without its massive military power, it counts for little in the world, with its massive military power, it makes others feel insecure and hurts its own economic prospects. It is a grim dilemma. [Emphasis original]

In short, Kennedy reflected a pretty mainstream opinion about the USSR in the late 1980s: the USSR was definitely not a rising power, but a breakup of the Soviet state was a hypothetical situation that was only the extreme end of possibilities. Kennedy tentatively hinted at a collapse, but in very dire terms:

Indeed, historically, none of the overextended, multinational empires which have been dealt with in this survey- the Ottoman, the Spanish, the Napoleonic, the British- ever retreated to their own ethnic base until they had been defeated in a great power war, or (as Britain after 1945) were so weakened by war than an imperial withdrawal was politically unavoidable. [emphasis original]

On the more extreme and alarmist end of projections on Soviet power, the US Department of Defense's annual publication Soviet Military Power continued to argue that Soviet military strength would grow into the 1990s. The pdf warning -1988 edition of Soviet Military Power argued that despite Gorbachev's diplomatic offensive, the Soviets had enacted no serious change in its offensively-orientated force structure. The bloated 1987 miniseries Amerika, inspired by a Ben Stein editorial against The Day After depicted the aftermath of a Soviet-occupied US after a Soviet EMP superweapon disabled the US.

Nor did science-fiction consider the Soviets to be in a state of imminent collapse. The 1984 film 2010 had the Superpowers on the verge of a nuclear conflict over Latin America. In the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, it was the US that had collapsed in the future, while the USSR kept chugging along. The original edition of Ender's Game had a Soviet superstate poised to attack the US and its allies at the end of the Formic War.

So given this context, it would have been highly unlikely for Gainax to predict the Soviet collapse. Jung's militaristic and technocratic character resembles some of the other depictions of the USSR in Japanese culture in this period. In the 1984 film The Return of Godzilla, the Soviets plan on launching a nuclear missile in case the Japanese cannot handle the Kaiju. The 1988 tv series Patlabor featured an episode with Soviet military mecha which was a boon for a KGB defector to Japan. The rather anomalous position of Japan during the Cold War (allied with the US, but not really hostile to the USSR and a culture generally aloof from the Cold War after the student protests of the 1960s) helped foster this peculiar view of the Soviets- militaristic, but not innately hostile to Japan.

And since you reminded me of Gunbuster, enjoy this convention sketch in which Jung gets her Trabi quickly because of time dilation.

In Daron Acemolgu and James Robinson's book Why Nations Fail they briefly discuss Soviet Russia and note that Paul Samuelson, a Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics winner, and leading economist at the time, repeatedly predicted that the USSR would overtake the US economically. The 1980 edition of one Samuelson's textbooks apparently predicted that the USSR would surpass the US between 2002 and 2012.

Follow-up questions: was there any point where the Soviets could have turned things around and held together? Also, how influential was the US's foreign policy? If they had been more open to Glasnost and not so bellicose, would that have helped the USSR last longer?