Here's a quote from Vladislav Zubok's collapse that shows what Andropov thought about this:

From the early 1960s, when he worked in the Party apparatus in Moscow, Andropov surrounded himself with scholars and intellectuals. He wanted to know what the intelligentsia thought; he was also interested in the problem of modernization and renovation of Soviet economy. Andropov’s intellectuals were people of the war generation, who believed in Marxist-Leninist socialism, were shocked by revelations of Stalin’s crimes, and dreamed of reforms from above. 7 One of them, Georgy Shakhnazarov, a philosopher and sociologist, recalled a discussion between them: what could be a viable communist model that might replace the Stalinist model? Andropov invited his intellectual “consultants” to speak with absolute candor.

Andropov posed Lenin’s famous question: What is to be done? How to make the Soviet state function well as an instrument of socialism? Shakhnazarov responded: the problem was the stifling Party diktat. Without “socialist democracy” and genuine elections, the consultant argued, the Party bureaucracy would always act as a class with vested interests, and would not care about people’s well-being. Andropov’s face darkened. He cut Shakhnazarov off. In the past, he said, the Soviet system had accomplished fantastic, nearly impossible things. The Party bureaucracy, he acknowledged, had got “rusty,” but its leadership was ready “to shake up” the economy. It would be a folly to dismantle the Party-State prematurely. “Only when people begin to feel that their life improves, then one can slowly loosen the yoke on them, give them more air . . . You, the intelligentsia folks, like to cry out: give us democracy, freedom! You ignore many realities.” 9 “In some unfathomable way,” Shakhnazarov recalled, “two different men co-existed in Andropov—a man of the Russian intelligentsia, in the common sense of this word, and a bureaucrat who saw his vocation as a service to the Party.” 10

You may be right that he would have been pressured into doing some kind of Glasnost-like political reform at some point, but the question is if it would have happened in an improving or deteriorating economic and social situation. Gorbachev rammed through Glasnost because he blamed the Party for the failures of Perestroika and was looking to create a political force to counter it. Several of the AES countries that still exist, specifically China, Vietnam, and Cuba, have implemented political reforms that are aimed at making Socialist institutions more responsive and accountable to the public, and the intelligentsia of those countries seems to be happier with their system than the Soviet intelligentsia were.