> The malls
Where did you find a mall in the USSR? I do not remember even the concept of such a thing existing in the 1980s. There were only department stores (универмаги).
I suspect you may be misremembering and mean a large department store located in an >1M population city.
> were full to the tilt
Full of goods or of people? Were those people from out of town, taking a day-long train ride because in their small towns/villages there was little for sale besides vegetables and bread?
> the prices within reach for everybody no matter their occupation
For an ordinary engineer, a new color TV set cost something like 6 months of gross income. A set of bookshelves (стенка) was 1.5 years. A new car (Zhiguli) was around 5-6 years - and even if you had the money, you would spend years waiting for your turn to have the right to buy one!
> Education was free, hospitals were free, people had house, car, etc.
Education - sure, that was a true Soviet achievement. Hospitals, while free, were horrific. Housing was heavily subsidized, but there was a terrible shortage of it; it wasn't uncommon for whole families to live in one room of a communal apartment (sharing the apartment's one bathroom with a half dozen other families). As for cars - a car was a luxury (although attainable with some effort) and a status symbol.
> The only things you could not freely buy were some of the "designer" goods that belong to the "want" category (not "need").
Replace "designer" with "not falling apart the day after purchase and not looking 20 years out of fashion".
> And I also recall that the USSR propaganda was working full-time to dissuade the common folk to avoid the trappings of the Capitalist societies.
The propaganda kinda lost its effectiveness after the 1960s or so. Certainly by the 1980s few, if anyone, believed it.