Not even good pizza either, could've gotten a way better deal from Italy or even Spain

Granted, we still have China at least but he still fucked a lot of people over and greatly reduced lifespans in Eastern Europe/North and West Asia.

that gorbachev was actually one of the last real leninists in the cpsu at the time.

Left-libs don’t demonize Lenin nearly as much as Stalin, so in this instance they’re trying to eulogize by drawing connections to a more respected Marxist figure

I think part of it is that Gorby thought he was securing a future for communism. He was an idiot, but plenty within the party couldn't care less at that point.

The most in-depth analysis I've seen of the Gorbachev era was basically that Gorbachev himself was basically entirely uncreative and indecisive, while otherwise being a fairly competent and likeable bureaucrat. If someone was telling him what to do he would do it well, but his own ideas were half baked and disastrous whenever he tried to enact them. So he started listening to a diplomat who'd been living overseas in IIRC Canada for quite a while and on his advice took a bunch of anticommunists into his circle and from there just started enacting the bullshit they were selling him as "doing social democracy from the left."

Even that would have been survivable for the Soviets if it didn't also go along with putting anticommunist extremists in charge of state media outfits and agreeing to plans to isolate and undermine local branches of the CPSU when they started doing open, competitive elections which let black market syndicates sweep because they were able to campaign and work together while the CPSU candidates were isolated and hamstringed, and all that laid the groundwork for Yeltsin's coup.

Not that it can be solely blamed on Gorbachev and his bloc, because there's no way all this could have happened without a bunch of other longstanding failures of political education. Like the educated class in the USSR knew that the equivalent class in western countries had significantly more consumer goods, but they didn't understand that that came from imperial plunder and superexploitation rather than some sort of magical "efficiency" of market competition, so they were shocked and confused when free market reforms crashed the economy and not only reduced their access to consumer goods but also all the basic necessities of life that they'd previously been taking for granted. Another point is that the counter-coup by Soviet Officials would have succeeded except they stopped in the middle of it to look for Gorbachev's approval and he just waffled indecisively until it all fell apart - the fact that they felt they needed his approval to save the USSR was another symptom of this decay and failure of political education, because even though they knew what they had to do they were unwilling to see it through without reassurance from someone they shouldn't have been trusting at all at that point.