To what extent was Mikhail Gorbachev responsible for the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union?

Many Historians contributed the fall of Soviet Union directly to Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms. They argued that Gorbachev’s Glasnost, (openness) and Perestroika, (restructuring) directly led to uprisings within the Soviet Union, and its Soviet republics that brought the downfall of Soviet Union. This is however a very shallow analysis of the downfall of the Soviet Union. For one to truly understand the fall of the Soviet Union one must understand the history of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and the political and economic situation of the former empire when Gorbachev took reign. For example the USSR’s stagnating economy compounded with the arms race, ethnic tensions, war in Afghanistan, as well as the communism ideology itself, all played great roles in the downfall of USSR. Gorbachev’s reforms merely torpedoed an already sinking ship, as the Soviet Union was doomed to fail at the moment Stalin took over. Gorbachev’s reforms also played a part in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He tried to combat all these problems with glasnost and perestroika, however it was too radical at the time and was too little too late. The reforms themselves were flawed, as they were too radical and not properly implemented. Gorbachev’s reforms were literally the polar opposite of the policies of his predecessors. This radical change plunged the USSR into chaos and eventually the fall of the Soviet Union. If one were to truly comprehend the cause of the Soviet Union’s downfall one needs to understand the economic and political situation of USSR before Gorbachev came into power. One may argue that the Soviet Union was doomed to fail from the moment Stalin took power. The command economy under Stalin took the capitalist world by surprise. Large scales of industrialization, and economic growth had many critical flaws as one Polish economist states, “state socialism was not a good idea badly implemented, but a bad idea which was implemented