Fair enough, nobody knows everything. Ignorance is relative.

I don't think much of US military policy but that doesn't mean individuals who are in the employ of it have no senses. Official US policy up until 1989 made the USSR into an all- powerful bogieman.

Reports from the Soviet Union - by a lot of other individuals - usually remarked on shortages of basic items, such as food. They also mentioned a social order that was defined by alcoholism and paranoia. Development in the USSR was well known to be shoddy and unimaginative. The economies of the Soviet republics were undeveloped. The remark that best dercribed Soviet- style economics was, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." The Ruble did not trade and exchange outside of the USSR was an outflow of military hardware and inflows of commodities such as wheat. If a country can't feed itself, it has problems, no matter how many nuclear weapons it has.

The Soviet balance of payments was effected by low oil prices in the 1980s, but their command economy was bankrupt long before. Because the ruble didn't trade, there was no way to measure, so the Soviets could maintain the illusion of solvency.

The Soviet government was fatally affected by the debacle in Afghanistan. The satellite states of the Empire, particularly Poland, the Baltic states and Czechoslovakia, noted that the invincible USSR could be defeated on the battlefield by small forces and simple weapons. The Red Army was demonstrably a hollow force. For an empire held together by arms and the secret police, the failure in Afghanistan was the end of the USSR.

A second great failure of the USSR was Chernobyl. The reactor failed because it was a poor design and the management idiotic. The lack of accountability in the Soviet government was exposed as a weakness. None of this had anything to do with oil prices.

As for the roads ... things don't seem to have changed much:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXYagU_SnmI&feature=related

If someone wants to claim that the Soviet collapse was PARTLY peak oil episode, I'll agree to a point, but the context of that failure is important. Many of the same social ussues exist in Russia; rampant alcoholism, a non- productive economy (outside of energy) and a thinly traded currency. Their government's exercise of military force in Georgia is troubling. It makes them unpredictable. The next step is unreliable. Russia could fall into serious trouble, still possessing considerable petroleum resources.

Finally, the American financial crisis has little to do with Peak Oil. It is the cumulation of decades of small return on investment. This has reduced the savings rate to zero and made investors into gamblers. Right now, the speculative CDS market is pushing down the values of underlying securities - the mortgage based bonds that are corroding bank balance sheets. Intermediation speculation (swaps between banks) is doing the same thing to money markets.

This is my opinion and should not be the basis of investment decisions.