Well, they did have refrigerators, but they indeed were less widespread. I remember visiting relatives in my childhood and they didn't have a refrigerator sometime in late 1970s. Consumer goods were in short supply, that is true, and they actually never cought up with the West until the fall of the USSR. Not to mention personal cars, that was a real luxury.
I'm actually curious as to how much of that was the overall inefficiency of the Soviet system, and how much was simply due to the lack of industrialization that the Russians had to overcome.
Something a lot of (North) Americans take for granted is that, after WWII, we had the only functioning manufacturing base in the world -- we were China before it was cool.
