Eventual Arab Spring was also in some way the society maxing out the amount of lies that can be told to each other and continue without bigger consequences. Some day things like hunger, illiteracy, jobs, living standards, economy all catch up you and your reality. And that's the day reality itself gives you a brutal appraisal of the situation.
Taubman noted that the disaster marked "a turning point for Gorbachev and the Soviet regime".[217] Several days after it occurred, he gave a televised report to the nation.[218] He cited the disaster as evidence for what he regarded as widespread problems in Soviet society, such as shoddy workmanship and workplace inertia.[219] Gorbachev later described the incident as one which made him appreciate the scale of incompetence and cover-ups in the Soviet Union.[217] From April to the end of the year, Gorbachev became increasingly open in his criticism of the Soviet system, including food production, state bureaucracy, the military draft, and the large size of the prison population.[220]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gorbachev
Gorbachev might not have the man who messed it all up, but he was the last man to see through the end of this. Basically this kind of rot is long set in motion, and eventually leads to a black swan disaster event, then every one wakes up to the deep truth they knew all along, but chose bury and move on with their daily lives instead.
The job of leadership on the basic level is to give this brutal self appraisal to themselves, before these disaster big black swan events and do what it takes to fix them.
As an Indian reading this is scary enough as it is. India has been on this disastrous path for long now. Every now and then there is some respite from this. But deep down everyone knows the society is broken, there is mind boggling amount of corruption(Like you said "every man for himself"), and other standard set of problems have long plagued the country.
I hope there won't be a black swan disaster event. But given the history of the world and inevitability of these things, I wonder if one comes along, what could that be?
Gorbachev's point was more about public opinion than political machinery or party hierarchies.
Infighting factions had been a fact of life in the USSR since foundation, but the public as a whole still operated on the presumption that the State existed and was working with some degree of competency and some degree of shared purpose (if inscrutable or stupid most of the time).
Chernobyl laid bare that the social contract was effectively broken and the State could not guarantee the most basic protection even from itself. The system as a whole was effectively deligitimized at a very basic level, and it soon became "every man for himself". This is why subsequent attempts to solve matters among hierarchies in the traditional way (coups and so on) just failed - the public had moved on.