By the end of the 1980's, severe shortages of basic food supplies (meat, sugar) led to the reintroduction of the war-time system of distribution using food cards that limited each citizen to a certain amount of product per month.
Moreover, there was literally nothing on shelves of stores everywhere including usually relatively well supplied the capital of the USSR Moscow. I had seen that result of "perestroika" with my own eyes.
Let me also remind Mr Gorbachev that in the late 1980's a growing tension among the ruling communist elites of the central government and so-called national Soviet Republics ended up with an open confrontation against the central government in Lithuania. Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia and some other national Soviet Republics were about to brake away from the Soviet U-nion.
Hardliners in the Soviet leadership, calling themselves the 'State Emergency Committee', launched the August coup in 1991 in an attempt to remove Gorbachev from power and prevent the signing of the new u-nion treaty. During this time, Gorbachev spent three days (19 August, 20 and 21) under house arrest at a dacha in the Crimea before being freed and restored to power and shortly ousted again.
It was the collapse of the Empire of Evil - U-nion of the Soviet Socialist Republics. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kurdistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan declared their independence.
Dear Mr. Gorbachev, thank you for your kind advice for a need of far-reaching 'perestroika' reforms in the United States, but you would be much better off keeping it for the current situation in Russia. The latter does need another one especially in the part of freedom and democracy.
Sorry to say that, but you Mr. Gorbachev the last mentor who should give your "perestroika" advise to the people of the United States.
WE THE PEOPLE still keep our Republic and "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" that is in fact our "new model of a society, where politics, economics and morals went hand in hand."