[Matt Lakeman summary (emphasis added): The link is to a declassified CIA document written in 1968…The author is a CIA spy who explains that the CIA was trying to calculate the economy of the USSR, and by their best estimates, the US GDP was more than 2× the USSR GDP, and the US GDP per capita was around 3×. However, she thinks these numbers are overestimating USSR GDP because it’s difficult to account for quality. An American haircut can be priced the same way as a Soviet haircut, but an American refrigerator is probably vastly better than a Soviet refrigerator.

So the author goes undercover in Moscow for a few months to live as the Russians do and see what economic life is really like for them. She explains that she tried to live the Russian way as an American working at the embassy, but the locals were super nice to her all the time. They always smiled and sent her to the front of every line. So she had to get beat up local clothes, dust off her Russian language skills, put on a grumpy expression (presumably), and pretend to be a Russian (or rather, pretend to be an Estonian due to her accent). Her findings:

Lines, lines, and more lines. Everyone had to wait on line for everything. Food, clothes, whatever. Wait times were 10–15 minutes at best, but could easily stretch into hours. Sometimes she waited on lines even when she didn’t know what she was waiting for.
Even in Moscow, the variety and quality of goods was atrocious. At a given grocer, they might offer two or three different items each day. So one day she could get pickled fish, the next day cabbage and tomatoes, the next day rice, etc. Bread seemed to be the only thing that was always in stock.
Stores were often bureaucratic clusterfucks. The author couldn’t just buy tea; she had to wait on one line to make a tea selection, then collect a piece of paper, then wait on another line to exchange the paper for money, then get another piece of paper, then wait on another line to exchange that piece of paper for tea.
Prices were outrageous by the standards of the salaries of the people working in the capital city of the second most powerful nation on earth.
The service was awful. She went to some of the nicest restaurants in Moscow (of which there were fewer than a dozen in a city of millions of people), and the meals would take at least 3 hours. Waiters would stand around doing nothing and wouldn’t come over to her even when she called them.
Everyone was incredibly rude. She was violently shoved on trains and buses. People screamed at her if she hesitated on lines.
There was a general feeling of boredom and malaise. There were no luxury goods to buy or events to look forward to. People expected to just live, get married, and wait to die.
Everyone knew the government reports about how awesome the USSR was doing were bullshit. They envied the West.]