I just read this article about the collapse of the Soviet Union. In it, it is stated that the standard of living in the eastern European countries is higher than in the Soviet Union itself, especially around 1985.
Is this statement true, and, if so, what was the reason for this?
I'll give you the basic answer. I'll be happy if someone will expand on this.
Yes, this statement is true. I mean, why not? Most of them had greater industrial development before WW2, they were less damaged during WW2(excluding Poland, which still got nice German territories in exchange for Western Belarus and Western Ukraine that USSR took in 1939), they had less territory and population to develop, they were not wasting tons of resources on foreign politics and military domination, they had not undergone collectivization and so on.
Of course, USSR was very diverse, as is Eastern Europe. Say, people in Moscow, Leningrad, maybe Kiev were as wealthy as people in Berlin. People in 500.000 - 1 mil. cities were roughly as wealthy as people in basic East European cities, and they lived better than, say, people in Romania or Bulgaria. But USSR also had great vasts of undeveloped or even uncharted territories like a small mountain village in Tajikistan or some settlement acting as a pit-stop for Yakut nomads in Siberia - for them European standards of living hardly apply.