True - but, only because Gorbachev did not make a Top-Down violent response to stop it.
He had very compelling incentives. The Soviet Union was broke and needed loans from the western governments to buy grain or they would starve. These loans came with strings attached.
https://tamilnation.org/intframe/070419collapse_of_soviet_union.pdf
>When the situation in the Soviet Union is examined from financial and hard currency perspectives, Gorbachev’s policies at the time are much easier to comprehend (see figure 6). Government-to-government loans were bound to come with a number of rigid conditions. For instance, if the Soviet military crushed Solidarity Party demonstrations in Warsaw, the Soviet Union would not have received the desperately needed $100 billion from the West. The Socialist bloc was stable when the Soviet Union had the prerogative to
use as much force as necessary to reestablish control, as previously demonstrated in Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. But in 1989 the Polish elites understood that Soviet tanks would not be used to defend the communist government.
>The only option left for the Soviet elites was to begin immediate negotiations about the conditions of surrender. Gorbachev did not have to inform President George H. W. Bush at the Malta Summit in 1989 that the threat of force to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe would not be employed. This was already evident at the time. Six weeks after the talks, no communist regime in Eastern Europe remained