Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Soviet government publicly denied participating in the Moon race against the United States while secretly pursuing two programs. Details of both programs were kept classified until 1990, when glasnost allowed them to be published.
The two programs were a crewed lunar flyby using the Soyuz 7K-L1 (Zond) spacecraft launched on the Proton-K rocket, and a crewed lunar landing using the Soyuz 7K-LOK and LK spacecraft launched on the N1 rocket. The flyby program was canceled in 1970 and the landing program was officially canceled in 1976.
Alexei Leonov, who led the second cosmonaut training group focused on the landing mission, has the strongest claim to have been the Soviets' first choice to be the first man on the Moon.
All four N1 test launches, in 1969 twice, 1971, and 1972, resulted in failures. The second launch on the 3rd of July 1969 was the most catastrophic, destroying both the rocket and the entire launch complex and delaying the program by two years.
The Soviet LK lunar lander carried only one cosmonaut and had a mass of about 40% of the Apollo lunar lander. The entire Soviet L3 complex placed in low Earth orbit weighed 93 tons, compared to 137 tons for the Saturn V payload.
Five LKs and three LOKs survive in company museums. Nearly 150 first-stage engines built for the N1F were stored by the Kuznetsov Design Bureau and later sold for use on other launchers beginning around 2000.