“In the post-Stalin period much changed, but the party remained inviolable. Khrushchev’s attempt to relax the party’s tight hold on everyone and everything by granting a larger role to the government apparatus cost him the post of general secretary of the party.
During Perestroika a policy was adopted of fundamentally reorganizing party activity, democratizing it internally, and later changing its very role in society.
…The fact is that the CPSU began the reforms when leaders who were adherents of reform were in its leadership. Moreover, those changes would not have begun at all if the initiative for them had not come from the CPSU…[thus, resulting in the formation of] the reform group at the head of the party.”
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
Source: Gorbachev, M. (2000). English edition of the “Razmyshleniia o proshlom i budushchem”, USA: Columbia University Press, pp. 22.
It's pretty clear that the Soviet Union and the CPSU needed reforms, but they should have been implemented by someone who understands how power actually works. The fact that two men as deeply pathetic as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin could rise and tear the Soviet Union apart between them indicates that there really was something deeply wrong at the heart of the Soviet political system.