Basically you were the ruling class and think that's how USSR was for average person :)
Here.
FWIW I have a friend from Azerbaijan who saw a lot of the USSR as well. I don't know the details, and there will likely be people here on HN with first-hand USSR experience who can tell me why my memory makes no sense. But his story was that there was money but you couldn't use it for much, except train tickets. They saved it up and then took epic train trips through the USSR, once up to Estonia and once east towards Kyrgyzstan (not sure they got that far though), stopping in every republic along the way.
His parents were a craftsperson and a high school teacher. Don't make assumptions about strangers on the internet.
Not necessarily ruling but definitely highly privileged. You definitely could not just travel on a whim inside the USSR. You needed special permission from the government, which was most commonly (but not exclusively) given to people whose job depended on travel.
The restrctions might have been somewhat more relaxed in the middle of nowhere in Asia, but they were extremely strict for example in occupied Estonia where I'm from. You couldn't even travel inside the whole capital city of Tallinn, even if you yourself lived there. The city was divided into zones and there were border guards protecting these zones. You can only go to a zone that has a shoreline when you directly reside there. Otherwise you might try to escape the utopia. -- The restrictions of course go way beyond just Tallinn. Want to visit one of the 1500 islands of Estonia? Too bad, not allowed unless you live on the specific island. Want to just explore the countryside? Might be somewhat possible, but better be careful not to get close to any of the secret closed cities or any of the numerous missile silos, unless you want to be labled as a threat to the USSR.
No, you did not need permission to travel inside the USSR. I don't know about Estonia, but we were living in Tashkent and before I was 13 I have visited Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Alma-Ata, Vilnyus, and several other places. All that travel was pretty much leisure. My parents were engineers - very not elite. On business my mom traveled to Tbilisi, Talinn, Baku and god knows where else. And yes, we lived in "the middle of nowhere in Asia" (aka Tashkent) and had been in pretty much every corner of a huge country.
A certain amount of people still presume that people in that wave were all Soviet dissidents, intelligentsia, and repressed jews, and etc.
It only came to New Yorkers years later that whom they let in were faaaar from being some poor average Soviet citizens. CPSU members themselves, mafia, ex-spooks.
Back in nineties, an average Russian citizens would need to save for years just to buy a one way ticket to US, and legal paperwork.
Nobody, no regular person in early nineties Russia had money to just to fly to US, and buy a NYC apartment for cash.
A price of a NYC apartment was a few lifetimes worth of savings for even best paid people in union's government.