If the USSR had dissolved due to issues like the ones you're talking about (Gulags being basically entirely dismantled after WW2 so 45 years before the dissolution, and breadlines being nonexistent until the 1980s liberalisation during Perestroika), it would have been dissolved with the popular consensus. There was a referendum in 1990 that asked the citizens of the Soviet Union if they wanted to maintain their country under communism and 70% of voters (admittedly a few republics didn't participate) voted yes, so the USSR was extremely popular and people didn't want it dissolved. The reasons for the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution of the USSR are much more complex than that.