Yes, his reforms were incredibly unlikely to succeed, but what if they somehow had, and a reformed Soviet Union continued to exist to the present day?
He needed to ditch the political liberalizations. The USSR was different from China in that it consisted of a ton of slave states of non-Russian people. The residents of those areas were never going to be interested in staying with the country; all liberalizing did was give them room to aggressively press for independence (not that I think that was a bad thing).
If he wanted to save the Soviet Union he should have just focused on reforming Soviet agriculture in the Chinese manner and opening up a degree of private industry everywhere else. That would at least have delivered the growth that the stagnant country desperately needed.
Agreed. The Soviet Union still couldn't feed itself (in 1991!)
In fact, the only thing that seemed to work at least nominally was the party's political control mechanisms.Changing that while trying to open up the economy was just asking for an implosion.
They were actually headed for starvation as it was. It's a math problem. You can't have your economy remain completely stagnant for decades while spending in excess of 20% of it on military stuff while still having enough resources left to feed your people.
You could (and many have) write multiple dissertations on the fiscal buffoonery that was occuring in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev to Gorbachev years.
The last chance at real positive reform ended with Khrushchev sadly.