Hello historians! Today in class I mentioned that the first man on the Moon was Neil Armstrong. To my surprise, I was quickly corrected by about half of my classmates (about 10) and the professor, who told me that I was, in fact, wrong; the USSR had actually sent a man to the moon a year before the US. Being a space nerd, I was shocked by my apparent basic misunderstanding of history, so after class I asked about it. One of the students told me that in reality, the Soviets had sent a man to the surface of the moon in a capsule, but that he never actually did any EVA- and the US government hid it from us to keep us patriotic and happy. I've looked around but I can't find any information on a Soviet manned lunar mission predating ours. This seemed odd to me, as one would think that if the government were hiding these things from us, they'd also hide the Venera missions, when the Soviets sent something to another planet for the first time. Am I a complete idiot or is this some conspiracy theory? Thanks!
Any successful mission to the Moon by the Soviets--even without an EVA--would have been enormous news that Moscow would have trumpeted around the globe. The idea that such a mission could have been kept secret is preposterous: missile launch detection satellites had been in orbit since the mid-1960s in the form of the MIDAS program, and any rocket large enough to get to the moon would certainly have been noticed. Various ground-based radars would also have noticed a sizable new object in orbit, and radio traffic coming from the moon (or a trajectory consistent with lunar orbit injection) would have been noticed.
The Soviet lunar program was a bit of a mess, with at least two major programs and sever minor programs running simultaneously and competing for men, materials, and money. Sergei Korolev is the name most widely known in the West, but Vladimir Chelomei ran the other major program, and got political points (and budget) for bringing on Sergei Khrushchev, son of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Fights between rocket and engine designers meant that Korolev lost out on the preferred engines and had to go with inferior engines provided by a design bureau with essentially no rocket experience, leading to the need for 30 engines, a horribly complicated mess to handle even now, and automation was in its infancy at the time. However, after Nikita Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev, Chelomei fell from favor, and his (possibly better) project was canceled, and Korolev got the sole work to go forward.
However, Korolev died in January 1966 while in surgery. He was replaced by Vasili Mishin, Korolev's work partner for some 20 years. The Soviets managed to get some successful lunar firsts: Luna 9 managed a soft landing on the moon, and Luna 10 successfully orbited the Moon. Both occurred before the US could do the same thing. But note that we're running short on time: the Apollo 11 landing happened in June 1969.
The push to stay ahead of the Americans started to result in massive quality problems that resulted in the death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, who was killed in April 1967 when his Soyuz, having experienced numerous malfunctions during the flight, had one final malfunction when the descent parachutes failed to deploy. Manned flights were cancelled until designers and engineers could fix the problems. No cosmonaut would fly again for two years, essentially killing the Soviet chance to be first to the moon.
Ongoing problems with the L1 launch system further slowed development. The first somewhat successful launch ended up in the wrong orbit and had to be terminated, but it was definitely noticed by the West. In 1968, the only successful test mission occurred when Zond-5 was able to get to lunar orbit and back. The shock of a human voice coming from the capsule was allayed somewhat when it was learned to be a recording, but it certainly shook up the US space program. At the end of that year, Apollo 8 became the first manned mission to orbit the moon, and the Soviets realized they couldn't win the race. While the L1's successor, the N1, continued to receive some funding, continued failures, including one that destroyed the entire N1 primary launch pad, doomed the program.
There have been numerous hoaxes and urban legends about Soviet moon landings over the years. Some have claimed that there was an attempted landing but that the capsule crashed, or that the landing was successful but the astronauts never returned for various reasons. They're among many myths about the Soviet program where cosmonauts were killed and then erased from history, relying on the Soviet tendency to erase politically undesirable people from history but ignoring that Komarov's death was mentioned publicly and he received a hero's funeral despite an essentially needless death brought about by quality control issues (that part was probably not mentioned in Pravda). Most of the claims appear in tabloids that don't try very hard to poke holes in the stories. Russia has admitted to numerous embarrassing episodes since the fall of the Soviet Union, including the numerous failures of the proposed launch systems. Even a partial success like what your classmates suggested would have energized the Soviet space program and rocked the world.
Source: The Soviet Manned Lunar Program, edited and compiled by Marcus Lindroos