Perhaps unsurprisingly, your pub-based historian is conflating a number of things to make this argument.

First, the Western countries did pump aid into West Berlin - during the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949, when the Soviets closed land communications with the Western sectors of the city. The city literally ate because of round-the-clock deliveries by air. But that was one very specific crisis during the Cold War.

Next, it's worth noting that our Bacchanalian academic is performing a little sleight of hand - East Germany is getting swapped out with the Soviet Union. I'll let an expert on East Germany talk to living conditions in the GDR - while they weren't as horrible as all the Trabant jokes imply, and while this wasn't entirely the fault of communism (there are deeper historic trends that influenced how different parts of Germany developed - you might want to check out this thread answering a question posed by u/hawkma999), the differential and overall living conditions were strong enough to cause a persistent flow of emigration from East to West until the Berlin Wall and Inner Border were built.

On to the Soviet Union. It may come as a surprise, but the standards of living in the USSR were lower than in its satellite states such as East Germany - this was an ongoing source of irritation for Soviet leaders. The important thing to remember is that the USSR, and the Russian Empire before it, were large, agrarian, developing countries - its economic development and overall social situation in many ways more resembled that in a country like Brazil than France. And the USSR made some impressive strides towards universal literacy, increased industrial output, and (by the 1960s) a majority urban-based population. However, the goal was always to close the gap with advanced capitalist countries like Britain or the United States, and eventually surpass them at some point in the future.

Generally, when people talk favorably about Soviet living standards (or when it comes up in Soviet nostalgia), what is really being discussed is living standards after Khrushchev's reforms in the mid 1950s to early 1960s, and until 1980 or so. I think it's really, really, important to stress, as I do in this answer here, that there is no one, single "Soviet experience" - a time period covering some 80 years in the largest country in the world had vastly different material conditions depending on time and place. Even in this period when the Soviet system was stable and mostly "worked", it had severe issues in terms of production and distribution of consumer goods. There were extremely strict limitations on how Soviet citizens could spend their money, or buy products from abroad (let alone travel, or even communicate with foreigners).

You might see an argument floating around the internet that Soviet citizens ate better than Americans (in this 1965-1985 period...I don't think anyone argues that they ate better during the Stalin-era famines). It is at best a heavily-qualified truth, as I discuss here. A key takeaway:

Birman notes that there were significant inequalities in what was available in major cities such as Leningrad and Moscow and more provincial ones, as well as what was available to party members versus nonparty members, and that certain foods (say, pineapples or avocadoes) that one could find in US supermarkets were simply unavailable to anyone. Soviet citizens also often consumed fresh products much more based on seasonality. And I should note that Birman doesn't hold back in his criticisms of the US either: he notes that rural and urban poverty in the US has real malnutrition issues, and that just because US supermarkets have choices doesn't mean that everyone has the ability to exercise that choice.

So in summary: there are data sets that show the average Soviet citizen's caloric intake as higher than the average Americans. Some historians, notably Robert Allen, consider these more or less accurate, but all the data sets need adjustments in order to be compared to US figures. With that said, even when Soviet citizens were eating adequately, they were eating a very different diet from that of Americans, one that would, for example, include eating larger amounts of potatoes every day.

One final note is that often, especially in collective memory of post-Soviet peoples, Soviet living standards are compared favorably not to contemporary Western living standards, but to living standards in the former USSR after 1991. For at least a decade or so, during the social, economic and political transitions of that era, living conditions got much worse, culminating in a number of public health crises affecting the region.

Edit: Some sources -

Alec Nove. An Economic History of the Soviet Union

Robert Allen's Farm to Factory is a favorable overview of Soviet economic development, but even he is making the case that the USSR was one of the most successful developing countries of the 20th century, not a developed one.

Your question is based on a pretty poorly framed argument; West Berlin was not the only part of “the West” that could possibly have seemed more prosperous. As /u/Kochevnik81 explained, West Berlin was indeed being fed by the largest aerial operation ever undertaken, specifically because the Soviets were trying to starve it. I think he more than adequately explains that this is rather a preposterous proposition of an argument and that the answers to general standard of living are going to vary a lot over the course and location of the Soviet Union. Still, I think suggesting at all that the Soviet Union had better, or similar, living standards to the United States is so revisionist that it requires a thorough analysis.

This analysis will depend a lot on what you would define living standards as, and who you're comparing the Soviet Union and United States to. What do you value as a living standard? There are probably many aspects of life in the Modern West that many take for granted and forget to consider. Let's divide up some living standard categories and do some comparative analysis.

(I'm going to include a bunch of hyperlinks, not as sources, but as additional material for people to easily reference people and things they may not have heard of. References will be included at the bottom.)

#Definitions of Living Standards

There is a difference between Standard of Living and Quality of Life. Standard of Living includes access to material goods, wealth, and comfort, while Quality of Life is a more difficult to measure scale of happiness. Conveniently, the fellow at the Pub mentioned the one that is easier to objectively measure.

Now to measure Wealth things we can simply look at economy and take the basic measurements of wealth: per capita income, poverty rate, average income, per capita GDP, and Gross GDP.

Measuring comfort is more difficult. For that let's look at a few things. First, we'll attempt to measure and compare the two states in their ability to fulfill the bottom two tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: that is, Safety and Physiological Needs. For comfort, we should also compare freedom of speech and religion to consider how honestly anybody could live.

#Personal Wealth

The greatest challenge in comparing personal wealth is that the Soviet Union was overflowing with propaganda. The statistics that can be deemed as accurate during the Soviet era are pretty few and far between. Since American statistics are more complete, let’s find what does exist of the Soviet era and compare them.

Soviet Union

Despite the common understanding, there was indeed personal property in the Soviet Union. Two types, in fact: chastnaya sobstvennost (private property), which included means of production, and lichnaya sobstvennost (personal property), which included everything someone actually owned.

Wages fluctuated with demand. For example, an engineer in 1955 was making 168% of what other technical workers were making, but that was reduced to 121% in 1977. Sectors were assigned money wages at the top of the system, and specific jobs were granted pay in relation to that according to demand, technical expertise, etc. In addition to money wages, there were social wages comparable to guaranteed income, food stamps, education and healthcare vouchers, non-monetary coupons for state provided services. This social security made up roughly a quarter of the income any family in the Soviet Union would receive.

It is very difficult to judge exactly how much each family in the Soviet Union actually made for a few reasons. First, is the Soviet Union was rarely honest with the outside world and could afford to show no imperfection to their people. Second, the unique wage system made assessing monetary value, especially compared to the outside world, very difficult. Third, is the inflation that happened during the Soviet Union’s own time, and with Russian rubles since. What we do know allows us to compare a few select years of Soviet history.

In 1913, the average Russian wage was approximately 22 Rubles; between the Bolshevik Revolution and 1939, wages would only get that high between 1924-1927. In 1989, the Soviet Union admitted, as part of glasnost, that 20% of Soviet families fell below the poverty level. The Soviets acknowledged that in 1989, 20% of the population lived in the equivalent of $45 (2019) a month.

United States

In 1938, the United States introduced Federal Minimum Wage, ensuring all legally working people were to be paid at $0.25 an hour; equivalent to $4.50 or so today. In 1950, that had increased to $0.75 per hour, and in 1968 it reached $1.60 an hour, equivalent to $12 an hour today. From 1981 to the end of the Soviet Union, American minimum wage stayed frozen at $3.35 an hour.

Median household income in the United States since 1965 has hovered around $56,000 (2019) pretty much continuously, though with a little variation. Median net worth of households in the United States climbed from $55,000 in 1962 to $83,000 in 1989.

#National Wealth

Soviet Union

• GDP: $1.21T (1980), $1.57T (1982), $2.2T (1985), $2.65T (1989)

• Per Capita GDP: $5,800 (1982), $9,211 (1991)

• Labor Force: 152,300,000 (1989)

• Unemployment: 83% (1920), 81% (1926), 37% (1939), 19% (1959), 9.6% (1970), 6% (1979)

The value of all consumer goods in the Soviet Union in 1972 was $530B, compared with 1990 when it was approximately $2T.

United States

• GDP: $2.86T (1980), $3.34T (1982), $4.34 (1985), $5.65T (1989)

• Per Capita GDP: $14,410 (1982), $24,366 (1991)

• Labor Force: 125,557,000 (1989)

• Unemployment: ND% (1920), 3.2% (1929), (17.2% (1939), 5.3% (1959), 6.1% (1970), 6% (1979)

#Housing

Housing will vary possibly more than any other category on the time and place in which you are looking. But, the 1960s, as the other answer mentioned, are seen by some with Soviet Nostalgia as being a kind of “golden age”, if you will, of Soviet quality of life. Given that as the case, let’s compare a typical Soviet Khrushchyovka and American Levittown suburb.

The Khrushchyovka is a low-cost, quickly built concrete based apartment structure. To maximize space, time of construction, meet legal requirements, and cut costs, almost all Khrushchyovka were built to be 5 stories, because that was the maximum height that could be built without an elevator. Thus, very few, if any, Khrushchyovka have elevators in them. (Some later Khrushchyovka in Moscow may, due to being 9-12 stories.) Early Khrushchyovka apartments come in three variations: one room, two room, and three room. Each varies in size as 320 square feet, 470 square feet, and 650 square feet, respectively. Later Khrushchyovka made these rooms even smaller and even later ones disposed of the “entry hall” that separated the rooms. Khrushchyovka were planned to have a 25 year life span (in part because Khrushchev promise Communism within 20 years), but they are still extremely common in Russia. Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 of them were build, nearly 2,000 in Moscow alone.

American life in 1960 was largely centered on the suburb, though of course there were still massive urban and rural populations. 60% of American families lived in the suburbs and the suburban house became the go-to example of “the American Dream”. This ability to both live and work in a city and own a detached home was something that had not been possible for many in America before then.

Because the United States did not have a centrally planned economy, or state owned and funded property development, there cannot be a prototypical or archetypical “Suburban House”. I cannot say that one type of house would have X number of rooms or X number of square feet, because there simply isn’t a standard. I can, however, focus on one particularly well known housing developer that was very prominent in promotion of the suburbs.

His name was William Levitt and the suburbs would at one time be called Levittown. Levitt broke down housing construction into 27 steps and turned the house into an assembly-line product: 27 teams to work on each house, each taking care of one step. Levitt was completely up to 40 houses a day, radically fueling the race to the suburbs. Each Levittown House would have two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen in the back of the house so kids could play in the yard and their mother could watch them from inside. These houses were built row upon row, almost identical, hundreds at a time. This is the creation of the suburban sprawl you may see in some American cities.

On the negative side of Levittown, Levitt, despite being Jewish himself, would not sell his homes to Jews or black Americans. One made had made the "American Dream" accessible to millions, and the same man made it inaccessible to millions more.