The Soviet military of the mid-'80s were in a much better starting position, in terms of manpower and materiel, than NATO was. In that regard, at least, the Soviets were better prepared to win a long, drawn-out, conventional war of attrition.
Economically speaking, things weren't nearly as rosy for the U.S.S.R. By the late '80s, it's peacetime economy was in a shambles, with shortages of basic consumer goods. It simply couldn't continue to support a massive military and produce adequate quantities of basic necessities for public consumption.
That said, a command economy might be better suited to war than a capitalist one. I really don't understand how the Soviet economy during WWII was able to produce such massive quantities of war materiel after the devastating losses of 1941-'42, and the turbulent prewar years of forced collectivization and industrialization. Would it have been possible for the Soviet Union of the late Cold War period to have pulled off a similar feat in a European war with NATO?
A lot of this has been discussed before here:
http://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.php?t=897
To save y'all some time, my position is that the Soviet military
could have defeated NATO in a conventional WWIII. I don't believe that this would have been likely, but I do firmly believe that it would have been possible.