It’s almost not a useful question to ask. The USSR was trending poorly for 10-20 years prior to its collapse, ultimately succumbing to the economic war that America was waging against it. There is no one cause nor one solution. It’s entirely conceivable that it could still exist had it not been dissolved, and it’s entirely possible that this hypothetical version of itself would be a sick and hollow iteration of what it once was. Nobody could know.
If you look at it’s opposite, at America, I think we might find a clearer answer. As a reaction to the economic crises of the 70s, the United States’ ruling class elected to go all-in on the imperialist pillaging of the world. I would say that the imperialist destruction of the global south and their successful economic quarantine of the USSR was what really drove international socialism into the ground, in this way the 80s were the birthing ground of the global counterrevolutionary era.
But what could the USSR have done about this? Go to war with the West? This would have killed hundreds of millions, and destroyed everything they had built anyway. The political ascendancy of Reagan guaranteed this. The cultural zeitgeist thought it would happen. By the early 80s, the USSR was economically on its knees and the Reagan administration was feverish to deliver the killing blow.
There is no one action the USSR could have taken, if any. The world system is interconnected and this was beyond their control, being only one piece of an increasingly interwoven humanity. You must look at the whole picture, which also includes the rising brutality of the United States, the neocolonization of Africa, the vassalization of Latin America, and the containment of China. There is an ebb and a flow to all of these things.
Where the early 20th century was an era of change and revolution, the late 20th century was an era of reaction and counterrevolution. The counterrevolution has appeared to have won, but in its victory has grown decadent and plodding. If the previous three decades have been an era of victorious stagnation, what follows is a weakening of the dominant order and a turning into something new.
The world is getting old. Now is when we get to build the movements anew (at least in the western view). This century will see immense change, as did the last. Most of us just grew up in the quiet decadent stagnation of the previous 30-50 years and haven’t seen much. Talk to some old people and they’ll tell you about change.
That’s an excellent criticism. This was not to say that there are not immense lessons to be learned from the collapse of the USSR. There were a host of mistakes they made and we must absolutely internalize and not repeat them. And my comment above certainly disregards the agency in which leaders and nations operated in their respective times. It can be too easy to lapse into a hollow use of laws of opposites and short circuit real analysis. Appreciate your insight and reading suggestions!