Well, perhaps it was Reagan’s policy of confrontation which increased the USSR’s economy problems and basically made the KGB anoint a reformer like Gorbachev. What kind of economic reforms did the KGB seek? Anything like Lenin’s New Economic Policy?
That’s a very simplistic reading of history.
I agree that economists grossly overstated the size of the Soviet economy, but a little overlooked fact was that the Soviet economy became heavily dependent on Oil and Gas during the seventies and agricultural production began to decline during that period.
The Brezhnev years were periods of economic and foreign policy stagnation and Brezhnev neither had the brutal vision or the ruthlessness required to make the Soviet system work.
The Oil glut of the late seventies and 1980s and the costly campaign in Afghanistan drained the Soviet Union. So the KGB understood (without Reagan telling them), that something needed to be done. The Soviets also realised that the rapproachment between China and the US would lead them isolated, hence the search for a reformer in the mold of Deng to reinvigorate the Soviet system.
No serious ex-soviet political scientist will present such a simplistic view, there are a confluence of factors that cause a decline of an empire. I will be betraying my academic experience if I concluded that the Soviet Union collapsed simply because of Reagan, the truth is much more nuanced.
There was Lech Walesa at Gdansk who led the first mass movement to successfully challenge the Soviet system (after the failures of the Czechoslovakian and Hungarian uprisings). There was John Paul II and there was Thatcher. There were also millions of unnamed heroes.
I know Americans have a penchant for taking all the glory (Hollywood did movies about American pilots in the Battle of Britain and was very liberal about the facts in a movie about the Enigma machine - it was captured by a British submarine not an American submarine as the movie portrays).
Remember that the “greatest generation” (World War II) included millions of Britons, millions of Indians and about half a million Africans. America hardly ever wins convincingly when She fights alone, and the Cold War was neither fought solely by the Americans nor was it won solely by Americans.