Short answer: No. The average American citizen always lived better than an average Soviet citizen. But it wasn't entirely the Soviet government's fault.
Long answer: Why is a very difficult question to directly answer - but lower Soviet living standards overall are due to a mix of the failure of Soviet planning, priorities that were not about the consumer, and external factors such as war and underdevelopment.
Unlike the US, the Soviet Union suffered little from the Great Depression. But during the Soviet era, it had just suffered the First World War and a devastating civil war. Then, it suffered from the chaos of collectivization in the 1930s, and then the massive destruction of the Second World War, followed by a famine.
But in the US, meanwhile, apart from the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, America kept going from strength to strength, broadly speaking.
Even with the best policies in the world, and a great government, the Soviet Union would have struggled to raise living standards to American levels. From the 1920s, Soviet planners had to work from a far lower baseline of development than the US.
The Soviets inherited a country whose own industrial revolution had been abruptly halted by the chaos of war and then revolution. There was not much infrastructure and Russian industry was heavily reliant on foreign imports (the Tsarist air force, for example, was heavily reliant on French-built aircraft).
This article from 1960 might help: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1960-07-01/soviet-standard-living-and-ours
However, it's worth mentioning that Soviet living standards started getting better from the 1950s-1960s, and kept getting better until the late 1980s.
Key metrics here would be more families having their own housing (as opposed to Stalin-era kommunalka, or shared apartments and crowded workers' dormitories ) and their own cars.
Here's a more modern research paper: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/40198/wp812.pdf;sequence=3
Short answer: No. The average American citizen always lived better than an average Soviet citizen. But it wasn't entirely the Soviet government's fault.
This is a very difficult question to directly answer.
Unlike the US, the Soviet Union suffered little from the Great Depression. But during the Soviet era, it had just suffered the First World War and a devastating civil war. Then, it suffered from the chaos of collectivization in the 1930s, and then the massive destruction of the Second World War, followed by a famine.
But in the US, meanwhile, apart from the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, America kept going from strength to strength, broadly speaking.
Even with the best policies in the world, and a great government, the Soviet Union would have struggled to raise living standards to American levels. From the 1920s, Soviet planners had to work from a far lower baseline of development than the US.
The Soviets inherited a country whose own industrial revolution had been abruptly halted by the chaos of war and then revolution. There was not much infrastructure and Russian industry was heavily reliant on foreign imports (the Tsarist air force, for example, was heavily reliant on French-built aircraft).
This article from 1960 might help: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/1960-07-01/soviet-standard-living-and-ours
However, it's worth mentioning that Soviet living standards started getting better from the 1950s-1960s, and kept getting better until the late 1980s.
Key metrics here would be more families having their own housing (as opposed to Stalin-era kommunalka, or shared apartments and crowded workers' dormitories ) and their own cars.
Here's a more modern research paper: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/40198/wp812.pdf;sequence=3