In the case of Poland you did have a society on the verge of collapse. There had been a deep recession starting in 1978. Until then decade had seen massive hard currency loans supporting rapidly rising living standards and white elephant projects. Eventually the credit dried up, the Party sought to stabilize things buy large price hikes combined with frozen salaries and presto - massive labour unrest, which in the context of an authoritarian society automatically meant political unrest. The result was even more economic disruption culminating in a crackdown. The rest of the eighties saw very poor living standards (you really couldn't get anything in the stores on any sort of regular basis except for dairy products, bread, eggs, and root vegetables - not meat, not shoes, not toilet paper, not soap, not anything). The economy was kept from full collapse by the Soviets reacting to 1980-81 with signfificant subsidies starting in 1982 and increased private transfers from the West coupled with an increase in the hard currency store system (with change given in scrip).

In 1988 even this wasn't working as a decade of zero capital investment caught up with things. The Party asked the elder brothers for a sharp increase in subsidies and were turned down since the Soviets had financial issues of their own. That meant that living standards had to drop again. Given that the Party had zero popular legitimacy at that point, this left two choices. Either get the legitimacy from the opposition (unlike elsewhere in the Bloc you had a large well organized mass opposition movement operating underground - the legacy of 1980-81) or to resort to large scale bloodshed (and the unrest would have made the economic crisis even worse).

Moscow did not want its new and improved image in the West getting destroyed, so in late 1988 it greenlighted formal high level negotiations on a power sharing agreement that led to the legalization of trade unions, an opposition press, and most importantly semi-free elections in June 1989. One third of the decisive lower house was up for grabs, and all of a new, weaker upper chamber. The expectation was that you'd get a national unity government with Solidarity as junior partners.

Except it turned out that the Party was even more unpopular than anyone realized, even the Solidarity leadership itself, and the Party and its allied 'independent' candidates lost all except one of the seats that were open. To make matters worse, the gimmick of allowing several Party candidates to contest the closed seats turned out to have real consequences as voters systematically crossed whichever candidate was higher up in the Party hierarchy, meaning that the Party leadership was mostly unrepresented in the suddenly important parliament. Solidarity now had veto power over the choice of President (elected by the combined chambers and quite powerful) and used that to force a Solidarity led government with only the 'power ministries' in Party hands, plus an agreement that the next elections would be fully free. By the end of the summer the Party apparatus was disintegrating and the secret police was burning mountains of documents in anticipation of dissolution. The regime was dead and the only way it could have been revived was through a Soviet invasion with no guarantees about what the Polish Army would do.

Hmmh, somewhat of a long comment, sorry about that.

The Soviet state was centrally controlled and Gorbachev had enormous power as General Secretary of the CPSU.  I recall an interview with Gorby where he described a talk he had had with Shevardnadze once in Yalta.  They were both extremely frustrated by the constraints of their system, paradoxically.  They expressed that frustration as "We cannot go on living like this."  

Gorbachev's reforms aroused fierce opposition amongst many in the nomenclatura who rightly feared that these reforms would be their own undoing.  The Soviet system never considered that the whole system could be taken down by a determined General Secretary.  Gorbachev used events to put allies into key positions.  My sense has  been that, while he wanted to steer a more moderate course, in the face of resistance from hard-liners, Gorbachev essentially ended up using the political power he had as General Secretary to bulldog the existing system  by pushing through a new Constitution, holding elections, breaking the political monopoly of the Communist Party, breaking up state enterprises into smaller private enterprises and shedding the buffer states.  

I suspect that he thought he could more successfully influence the future direction of the Russian state and society and its relations with the former buffer states than in fact proved possible.  Less drastic reform efforts may well have failed and left the old system largely intact.  I consider Gorbachev to be a great historical figure.  We need a similar determined reformer in the USA.  May we be so fortunate as to have one.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Have you given your opinion of Dmitri Orlov's closing the collapse gap?

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith