Did the Russians have a moon program?

Factual Questions
1

The crazed ramblings of everyone’s favourite lunatic seethruart have at least done some good by raising my curiosity about the moon landings (and giving me a sig).

We are always taught that NASA had to get to the moon to beat the Russians but we never hear about their work. Did the Russians actually have an ongoing project aimed at landing a man on the moon? If so, how far did they get? When might they have made it if America didn’t get there first? Was the Apollo program more to do with fulfilling Kennedy’s dream before the end of the decade than a direct race with the Soviets?

I know that’s quite a lot to cover but I hope somebody can help. Thanks in advance.

2

I can’t remember where (unfortunately) but I’ve seen photos of the prototype Russian moon lander - a single-man lander that would’ve been piloted by one of the notable early Cosmonauts. Unfortunately, I’m having an addle-brained sort of day, so I can’t remember if it was Leonov or Gagarin that had been training for the mission.

3

I dunno about the U.S.S.R.'s capability or plans of atually landing men on the moon, but they were the first to take pictures of the dark side in October 1959 with Luna 3. The U.S.S.R. also reached the moon first with an unmanned spacecraft, Luna 2, which “hit” the moon 36 hours after takeoff in September 1959. Both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. landed several other unmanned probes on the moon in the 1960’s.

4

A quick search in Google under “Russian Moon Program” turned up this links page links page, which in turn took me to this site with a pretty detailed history of the Soviet space program.

5

Encyclopedia Astronautica has a couple of extensive articles about the Soviet moon program. They almost made it, but their moon rocket had an annoying tendency to explode shortly after launch.

6

The latter would seem to invalidate the former.

7

Well, specifically, the Russians needed a rocket powerful enough to carry both the Soyuz module and the lunar landing moudle and make it into lunar orbit. They had a rocket that worked just fine for sending the Soyuz into Earth orbit.

The problem was, the larger rocket (I believe it was the N-1) exploded during its first major test, and took out most of the personel who had worked on it. Had it worked, or even not failed quite so spectacularly, the Russians were on par with the US to begin lunar orbital missions and manned tests of the lunar landing module, which means they were only a year or two away from a lunar landing in 1967- about the same point we were at. But while the US was able to fix the Apollo problems and get back to progress, the Soviets never figured out how to manufacture a rocket of the size they needed.

8

As someone in the space program was heard to remark, “Our nazis (Von Braun, etc) are better than their nazis.”