I think the answer to your question is a very complicated yes, you have to remember that the cold war was essentially a massive arms race that lasted from ~1945 - 1991, you would need to take a specific decade from this time and and dissect the military capabilities of both countries for that era. In my (educated) opinion I think you would find that the closer you look to 1945 the weaker the USSR would be due to the staggering losses they suffered in WWII, conversely, from a non-nuclear standpoint, I think that the closer you look toward 1991 you would see a gradual increase in the USSR's ability to compete with the U.S. militarily.

The USSR would have had the means if it had been early in the Cold War to win a conventional war if one sparked up. The backdrop of 1984 suggests that had WWIII broken out in the late 1940s between the USSR and US, much of continental Europe would have easily come under the sway of Moscow had the Soviet conventionally invaded, the portion of Europe being the exception to this would be Great Britain.