Post-Stalin is not my area of expertise but in terms of living standards, once past the harsh Stalin years the Soviet Union followed a similar upwards curve in living standards as Western Europe. Life did indeed get cheerier from the 1950s onwards – mortality rates fell, nutrition improved, housing stock was renewed and increased mechanisation eased the peasant’s workload. This was part of the Khrushchev drive to improve living standards. So in absolute terms a late Soviet peasant enjoyed significantly better living standards than his late Tsarist counterpart. Which is as to be expected from an industrialised nation.

(This progress had faltered by the late 1980s when mortality rates began to creep upwards again and living standards stagnated. But that’s outside my comfort zone. Moreover, even stagnation would not have devolved )

The question gets a bit more interesting when you look at the relative comforts of the Soviet peasantry. After all, for all the material progress of the peasantry post-1960, they still lived on collective farms and worked to the state’s tempo. If we take this into account, ie consider the peasant’s ‘independence’, then the mid-1920s are worth examining. This was the height of the NEP and probably the high-point of the Russian peasantry: farming their own plots (on commune land), free of noble interference and with little incentive to sell (rather than consume) their produce, they would have enjoyed a relatively prosperous life. When compared to the cramped cities at least. The sophisticated (for the time) Soviet nutritional surveys of the period show that during the peak NEP (say, 1925-28) the peasants were eating better than they had been in 1913 or 1953.

So it depends on how you cut the question. In terms of material progress (diet, life expectancy, manufactured goods, etc) for an individual peasant then things got progressively better from the late 1950s onwards (to the late 1970s at least). In terms of their position and living standards relative to the urban world then the mid-1920s are where you want to look. What is absolutely clear is that the 1930s are the period in which the peasantry had the worst of both worlds: severely lacking for material comforts (eg food) and suffering intense state repression.

Sources: Stephen Wheatcroft’s done a fair amount of work on the early decades of Soviet rule. See particularly his First 35 Years of Soviet Living Standards (2009) and The Great Leap Upwards (1999). Robert Allen (Farm to Factory) would disagree with my assessment of the 1930s somewhat. I’ve taken the vaguer post-Stalin picture from a few general works.