I lived there (Odessa, mostly), till late teens. The QoL highly depended on who you knew, how to steal and how to bribe and barter, on all levels of society. You could live very well, relative to the gen pop, if you possessed these qualities and your parents were members of the party.

I suppose that can be said about everywhere, but it wasn't a desolate rusty bullet ridden hellscape, the cities were beautiful and so were the beaches, at least as captured in my memory.

My family had friends from Poland and Hungary and we always envied them, the green kind. So, I always assumed at that age things were nicer beyond the borders, but they weren't so bad locally either. Of course, in the end, it was a house of cards, but the life itself wasn't NK level.