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Notes -
Bangladesh just now is a good example, the military didn’t want to fight a civil war and so told the Prime Minister they’d be switching sides, then she fled. They were of the opinion (likely accurate) that the new regime could be made amenable enough to them. You need the military to be scared to really put up a fight, and often civilian leaders can’t manage that.
For the Soviet example, it’s questionable whether the red army was willing to roll back through to Berlin in 1989 to put down the whole thing, country by country. Honecker wanted them to, but that doesn’t mean it would have been easy, even if a hardliner had been in charge. In addition, at least some of the KGB elite did well out of the collapse, so the incentives were muddled there too.
You can be assured that there was not one higher-level officer anywhere in the Soviet armed forces willing to start shooting in order to keep the Warsaw Pact / COMECON together in 1989.
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