People over-exaggerate the certainty that the USSR would have fallen.
If survive means that the same exact political structure must remain, it is of course inevitably doomed. However, if it means preserving the "ideals", the political structure can be reformed into some sort of quasi-technocratic communism-lite.
Soviet ideology amongst some of the political sphere, bureaucrats & scientists was something similar to technocratism. The entire space race debacle "inspired" a lot of thought so to say. You of course had the hard-line communists, the centrist communistic socialists, the centralizers, and other political factions, but only the first one would be entirely against any change. Them getting completely whipped during their coup attempt, against a very fragile system, showed their ineptitude toward the latter days of the USSR.
If survive means that the same exact political structure must remain, it is of course inevitably doomed. However, if it means preserving the "ideals", the political structure can be reformed into some sort of quasi-technocratic communism-lite.
Soviet ideology amongst some of the political sphere, bureaucrats & scientists was something similar to technocratism. The entire space race debacle "inspired" a lot of thought so to say. You of course had the hard-line communists, the centrist communistic socialists, the centralizers, and other political factions, but only the first one would be entirely against any change. Them getting completely whipped during their coup attempt, against a very fragile system, showed their ineptitude toward the latter days of the USSR.