“Reagan cut off your window by pumping billion of dollars and a massive military buildup”
That was the visible part of it.
Reagan negotiating with the Saudi’s to flood the world with oil, dropping the price severely, played the biggest role of all. And he gets no credit for that.
That, along with the systemic and growing corruption within the Soviet system, brought it too it’s knees.
That it didn’t end up in a world war, is thanks as much to the efforts of Yuri Andropov, as it is to Reagan.
Andropov, as head of the KGB, saw the actual economic numbers, had traveled extensively, and knew what was coming. He knew that Russia couldn’t compete with the West any longer without significant structural changes, which many others on the Politburo opposed.
As Premier, he offered to end The Brezhnev Doctrine, and demilitarize the Western Soviet States. (needless to say, this wasn’t popular with the Politboru, or with Honecker)
And also remember that BOTH Gorbachev and Putin came from the Andropov camp. Gorbachev as an aide who Andropov recommended replace him as Chairman, Putin as part of the “Andropov Levy”, bringing in younger, new thinking as reformers into the KGB.
This is silliness. Is part of the reform throwing people head first out of windows rather than feet first? Gorbachev and the rest merely supervised the perestroika deception. The seeming liberalization of the USSR was being planned as early as the 1950s, and was predicted by KGB defectors in advance to its actual happening. What happened in Russia was a redux of Lenin's NEP, take 2 steps back, one step forward, as part of a larger strategy to disarm the west ideologically.
Real reform of that country requires full decommunization and dismantling of the soviet structures that put Putin into power.