Welcome USSR; nice username by the way
You're generally correct - living standards were probably the best in the early-to-mid 70s, although there are a few caveats. In terms of housing, clothing, food, there is no doubt that the 60s and especially the 70s were leagues ahead of the 1940s and 50s, when the country was devastated by war.
However, in terms of availability of certain goods, I've heard many accounts from old people living in the late Stalin period who remember stores (at least in regional capitals and in Moscow) being filled to the brim with various gourmet foods (cheeses, meats, wines, etc.) which would later become almost impossible to find without lines or 'blat' in the 60s and onward. This is probably due to the currency and price reforms in 1961, which made many goods cheaper but subsequently more scarce, and to more lax legal discipline, which led to a thriving market of underground corruption which many if not most retailers were in on.
Moreover, characterizing the late 70s and early 80s as a time of economic troubles isn't really fair; it was more a period of economic stagnation - i.e. continued growth, but very slow growth (1-2%). Just as importantly, the effectiveness of regional party bosses in governance had a huge effect on local living standards; in other words, if in the Belorussian Republic a local party boss could get fired if one of the promised 10 kinds of kielbasa was found absent in a store, in parts of Siberia and Central Russia shortages were the norm.
For instance, in response to the intense criticism of former Sverdlovsk region secretary Boris Yeltsin, who began calling for more and more radical anti-socialist reforms in the late 1980s, Yegor Ligachev, the former party boss of the Tomsk region, recalled that for his region, the so-called period of stagnation saw tremendous socio-economic development, while in Yeltsin's case, it ended up with his region being put on food vouchers.
-> Incidentally, Ligachev's memoirs are available in English; this means that if you want to get some insight into an Orthodox communist's struggle against Gorbachev and co., you can probably find them in your local university library, or on Amazon.
With regard to alcoholism, it certainly was a problem in the late Soviet period, and even more of one now, even though perhaps millions of people died from it in the 1990s.
Here's a chart illustrating the problem:
Yearly consumption of strong alcoholic drinks per capita, liters of pure alcohol 15% or more. Red bar shows Russia, blue Finland, green Norway, yellow Sweden, purple EU. Source: WHOThe question of the problem of alcoholism in the Soviet Union has been brought up before on this site. On one such occasion, I quoted from British journalist Michael Binyon's 'Life in Russia', a tough but mostly fair English language account of life in the country in the early 1980s:
viewtopic.php?t=46934Finally, with regard to your last question(s):
Alcoholism certainly did affect family life. Nonetheless, it cannot be said that it affected 'every family', unless you count extended families. Many people wouldn't touch the stuff at all, out of principle or due to alcoholism in the family. Moreover, criminal punishment was very tough on cases of rape and or physical harassment, whether alcohol-fueled or not. As to whether the streets were less safe, I don't think so. Less safe in the 80s compared to the early 60s maybe, but certainly not compared to the 90s or today, where there is a key-coded door to every apartment block and a metal door on most individual apartments. This has to do not so much with alcohol as with the general social environment at the time, and the knowledge or public confidence in the fact that criminals would be caught.
In the Soviet period, police would drive around at night in search of any drunks acting in a disorderly manner, and would take them to a detox center for the night. As punishment, they would often take whatever money the drunks had on them. For the most part, the conditions in the detox center were also kept as unpleasant as possible, so that offenders wouldn't have an incentive to return.
In his book, Binyon refers to the long-running campaign to shame alcoholics. This is well-illustrated I think in this 1965 clip by Fitil, a popular series of satirical short films tackling all sorts of socio-economic problems in Soviet society:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ58GSJqCOAThe clip, commenting on the tradition of drinking 'for three', pretty much speaks for itself. At the end, the narrator notes "We have cut this hooliganism short, and there's hardly a need to talk about the moral of the story."