End of Soviet Union - Who is responsible?

Yeah that's a good read. Another good read is "Socialism Betrayed" by Keeran and Kenny, which devotes a lot of analysis to the economy, the rise of the black market, etc.: b-ok.cc/book/1246151/ea7f45

This is my own summary of the USSR's demise:

Thoughts on Wolff and Resnick's book?

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Jesus christ what a fucking Shit-show….

As for the coup, what was the intended purpose of it, and what could've happened had it succeeded?

The Soviets didn’t invest in new technology to the extent the American did. This was because Brezhnev cut funding to research.

To restore Breshnevism

A civil war would occur, the anti-communist would win because NATO would join the war on their side. Or at they very least, their air force would.

The USSR between 1970-1984 had a lot of internal problems, but it took someone who purposely wanted to destroy it (Birthmark) to cause it to collapse in the way it did.

True, but in the actual economic view, the soviets were already minimizing Military expenditure as much as they could.
Yeah while it can be to an extent be attributed to bad planning, the other factor is the fact that the uSSR had less arable land than the USA, in spite of being far larger. It's sort of the same issue as with the DPRK.

Also the US was willing to invest in growing more food dense crops like corn which while Kruchevik tried to get the Soviets to do, everyone else tried to stop this.

Because Khruschev's corn reforms were devastating to the lands he was attempting to introduce them to. Not all land is the same, and due to his policies, the result was that a lot of top-soil got washed away due to this obsession with corn, causing a deficit in production and forcing the regions to recover over time.

Honestly my favorite on this subject is Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds. It explains the whole dynamics of it so well.

The organizers thought Gorbachev's new Union Treaty would have inevitably resulted in the USSR's demise, hence the coup to stop it from being signed.

The remark of the poster here that the coup was designed "to restore Brezhnevism" isn't really accurate. To my knowledge the organizers had no coherent ideology between them. The overriding theme was patriotism: that the demise of the USSR would be a catastrophe for its peoples and that criminal elements were pushing for its demise for their own enrichment.

Most of the coup's organizers later ended up supporting (or even working for) Putin.