Read both Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenney’s Socialism Betrayed and Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse. Gorbachev initially did think he was saving socialism, and he intended to model his tenure after Lenin. He felt that the state of the USSR was so degraded that he needed to sweep away the current structure of the state and the economy and completely revolutionize it, in the same way that Lenin had destroyed the Russian Empire and created a new state. There were two problems with this plan: the first being that the USSR’s situation wasn’t actually that dire, though it did have problems, and the second being that Lenin understood people and he understood power and Gorbachev didn’t understand either of those things.