Did a quick wiki, and was overwhelmed with the complexity of the situation.
Edit: Should have been more detailed -- I guess what I am asking is what were the major reasons and new rules that were placed in the 80's that led to the transition from the Soviet Union to slowly become less of a centralized government and eventually dissolving.
Did a quick wiki, and was overwhelmed with the complexity of the situation.
The situation is, in fact, quite complex, and if you ever find a single answer to a historical problem, I can state unequivocally that it is wrong.
You might want to rephrase your question to clarify what specific aspects you find particularly confusing so that you will actually get a good answer.
Yegor Gaidar was the prime minister of Russia under Yeltsin in 1992; he wrote several books on the subject.
So according to [1] the reasons were as follows:
the Soviet manager class (Nomenklatura): After Stalin the manager class no longer feared repressions; they formed many informal relations among their own kind and everything was decided by means of an internal bureaucratic barter market; The manager class was also aspiring to consolidate its status; they internalized their own position as real masters of the show. In the end they wanted to appropriate state owned property and turn it into their own private property; now Perestroika created the opportunity to to do just that: new private cooperatives made insider deals with management, these deals enabled large scale theft/privatization of state owned assets; actually the same scheme was in widespread use during the 1920ies - during the NEP period. Crumbling administrative controls during Perestroika were of much help during the late 1980ies.
collectivized agriculture was inherently inefficient - farmers just had absolutely no incentive to work. In the 70ies-80ies they tried to fix this by technological means: mountains of fertilizers, thousands of tractors, enormous amelioration works - all in vain. By the 80ies the USSR was a heavily urbanized country, so the trick of just dismantling state owned farms would not work here; there was nobody left who would be ready to work the land (however in China this step was quite successful).
They had to sell oil in order to buy grain; by 1985 oil prices went down, at the same time salaries went up; by 1990 the country was heavily in debt and nobody was ready to give them additional loans.
most of industry was working to produce weapons for the military; consumer goods were of a distant second priority. By the end of the 80ies they were producing mostly junk that could not be exported.
belated attempts of reform were not very effective: from 1985-87 it was about fixing 'isolated shortcomings' ; from 1987-89 reforms were about 'democratic socialism'; from 1990 onward they talked about transition to free market economics. At the same time administrative controls crumbled, the system was based on fear, once that element was gone there was nothing to hold/bind things together; with the absence of fear the administrative system crumbled.
the break up became inevitable after the armed coup of august 1991 : all republics just wanted out as a measure of precaution; the question of safety was very important, nobody knew would would come next in such a dysfunctional state; also the system just disintegrated. A power vacuum appeared, so local republics just took over.
I wrote up some notes as I read the book, they are on my site [2]
[1] http://lib.ru/POLITOLOG/GAYDAR_E/vlast_sobstvennost.txt "Власть и собственность: Смуты и институты. Государство и эволюция" Санкт-Петербург, 2009 - “Authority and Ownership, the Troubles vs the Institutions; the state and its evolution"
[2] http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/ramblings/2014/01/19/su-kaputt.html