The USSR had massive internal contradictions and inefficiencies. By the end it was brittle, and it couldn't weather shocks, like the late 1980s to early 1990s oil shock, very well, and attempts at reform magnified internal dissent until the constituent republics and satellite states could only be satisfied with complete independence.
>It is suggested that because the Soviet Union had out-of-date oil technology that production decreased. However over time, even in a closed system such as the Soviet Union, information about technology and technology itself must increase.
Why? The Soviet Union had numerous important failures in technology that killed their advancement, often caused by valuing personal loyalty (often treated as party loyalty) over all else, an act that will drive any system to failure eventually.
>There is no reason to believe that management was much better in the 1960's when oil production skyrocketed then in the 1980's when it stagnated
Again, asserted without evidence, as if there aren't hundreds of examples of good management being replaced with bad management, regardless of economic ideology or societal structures.
>Subsequent discontent pushed them toward democracy. The Soviet Union was left trying to simply keep NATO troops out of Eastern Europe but still letting the Eastern Europeans become democracies.
So now rolling tanks into at least one of the revolting countries is "letting the eastern Europeans become democracies"? Russia fought, and continues fighting to this very day, any and all "I don't want to be a part of russia anymore" ideology, including with lethal force.
The Soviet Union degraded over time because it was structurally and socially organized to encourage rewarding people who were loyal and projected strength than people who got things actually done. From the very top with Stalin himself, the way to move up was completely divorced from the way to improve efficiency. This importantly isn't about the economic system, but the ideology of leadership. The Soviet Union would have run into plenty of troubles with a system based on syncophantry even if it were a free market capitalist system. Allowing that kind of blatant corruption and suffusing it through all levels corrodes society. Or at least this is my opinion.
Regardless, my thesis wasn't that the USSR collapsed entirely because of an oil shock. It was that the USSR had severe structural problems and couldn't weather adversities such as the oil shock.
http://www.energycrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm
> To summarize, the period 1988 to 1992 was the world's third oil crisis in 20 years. This one brought down the powerful Soviet Empire.