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While the Soviet Union has long trumpeted the superiority of its economic system, the Soviet standard of living is still far below prevailing Western and East European levels . In 1976, for example , the Soviet standard of living was one-third the American level, and somewhat less than half the level of' France and West Germany . The relatively low standard of living in the Soviet Union can be traced to the fact that the Soviet government spends a considerably smaller share of its GNP on consumption than most West and East European nations . The Soviet Union has traditionally neglected its consumer sector, and this has resulted in chronic shortages of consumer goods and services and food supplies . Moreover, Soviet wage scales require consumers to devote about two-thirds of their earnings to basic necessities such as food and clothing . Thus, not only is the Soviet standard of living relatively low as compared to the West, but Soviet consumption patterns are also quite backward and resemble those of developing . nations more closely than industrialized nations .
Like any other nation, the Soviet Union contains many poor people, but the Soviet poverty sector is surprisingly large given the Soviet government's concern with its image as a socialist welfare state . Using Soviet estimates of' minimum family income requirements , it appears that the average family in 1965 existed in a state of poverty . A large number of surveys conducted during the 1960s revealed that as many as a quarter or a third of the urban working class lived below the poverty line, and since rural wages are about 10% lower than urban wages and rural inhabitants account for about 35% of the Soviet population, the total number of "poor" people in the Soviet Union was perhaps 40% of the entire population . Although industrial workers are among the best paid in Soviet society , available statistics indicate that almost a third of them do not rise above the poverty threshold . One can assume the situation must be considerably worse for the 30 million people employed in health care and education, and the 40 million workers employed in unmechanized production jobs .