https://www.quora.com/Did-government-of ... -in-luxury
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Eugene Kuznetsov, Grew up in Russia
Strictly speaking, it depends on what you mean by "luxury".
The Soviet Union had serious difficulties supplying its citizens with consumer goods, especially those that had to be imported (imports were limited, and domestic substitutes were rare and usually low-quality). For an average Soviet citizen, simply having a fruit bowl with pineapples and coconuts in the kitchen would have been considered an almost unattainable symbol of exotic luxury, sorta like having a Ferrari in the garage in the U.S. (the difference being that an average American sees Ferraris from time to time, but most Soviets, including some government officials, lived out their lives without ever seeing a real pineapple.) Government officials had better access to imports, they could reliably get e.g. imported clothing or electronics, and regular people generally had to get by without.
Without car-centric culture, the Soviet Union couldn't develop suburbia. Cities were designed with walking and public transit as the only means of transportation. Government officials weren't really getting a break here. That meant appalling amounts of living space per capita for ordinary people, and slightly less appalling amounts for "nomenclatura". It was considered a luxury to have a 1000 square foot apartment for a family of 3, especially within walking distance from Lenin's Square (pretty much every city had one, I think - that was the equivalent of "downtown" in the West.) The government officially aimed for 130 sq.ft. per person, excluding kitchen and facilities, but many people had less. My own uncle, a retired officer, and his wife raised two kids in a two-room (not "two-bedroom" - two room) 450 sq.ft. apartment.
On top of that, a necessary feature of the Soviet way of life is that there are _lots_ of government officials of all sorts, so simply being "a government official" wasn't a huge distinction.
So, as Alex observes, though government officials had more "stuff" than teachers or factory workers, an average U.S. plumber probably has an order of magnitude more stuff than a midrange Brezhnev-era party official.
However, what system lacked in its ability to supply people with material goods, it made up in other ways. Here, too, "nomenclatura" got more than teachers and workers or had first-line access whenever some resource was limited, but even workers received perks that might seem luxurious to Westerners. Start with free college education (not just "free" but "paid" as in "the government providing you with housing and paying you to study", the equivalent of what we call "scholarship" here); 3 to 5 weeks of paid vacation, a year of paid maternity leave, free preschool childcare, and retirement at 55 for women (60 for men.) Or two weeks a year at an all-inclusive resort. Children got access to a wide range of sports clubs, with all necessary equipment provided to members free of charge. How else do you think the Soviet Union could have managed to stay #1 or #2 by total medal count at both Summer _and_ Winter Olympics from 1952 to 1992 continuously (except for the 1984 Summer Olympics, which the USSR boycotted)? You couldn't buy a decent road bicycle in the Soviet Union for any amount of money, but, if you were willing to sign up for a cycling club, you'd have one available as long as you were a member (and, if you were really good, there was a limited number of Italian-made Colnago bikes available for people like you.) Even in the U.S., sports are costly. A plumber might afford to send his kids to tennis or boxing classes, but even a middling racing bicycle would eat up two or three months of disposable income, and you can forget about bobsled or sailing. In the Soviet Union, this was not a consideration because you weren't the one paying for the equipment or for trainer's time.
