How the Soviet Union Led and Lost 'The Space Race'

USSR was perhaps 80% of the way to the Moon flights. They had a spacecraft, which in the form of Zond flew around the Moon and returned with first animals from Moon's vicinity to Earth; a lunar lander, LK, which successfully completed 3 LEO test flights; and a big launcher, N-1, had upper stages tested (their smaller size allowed to do that easier than for the first stage). USSR also had automatic probes on the Moon surface and on the orbit around the Moon, with works toward later Lunokhods and automatic soil return.

Had Korolev been alive, he'd probably both realize the shortcomings of existing systems (chiefly engines on the first stage) and workarounds (one of Korolev's last directives was to enhance cooperation with Chelomei, leading to Proton-Zond circumlunar launches). If not the first, USSR would at least had manned landings, and then the question would shift to comparison of lunar infrastructure; by that time N-1 could be debugged, planned upper stage with hydrogen put in place and Barmingrad (a Moon village project) given go ahead. While expensive, USSR's manned Moon project costed about 6 times less than Project Apollo.

A big takeaway from N-1 problems was that rockets should be tested on the ground first; it costed a fortune, but Energia was tested on the test-stand in full and flew both times successfully. Which makes more troublesome recent ideas to launch SLS without comprehensive testing of launch stages on the ground.

ONE 'space race' not necessarily THE 'space race'.

Interestingly the Russians are still capable of putting men in space, while the US which 'won the space race' has not been capable of doing that for the last decade or so.

I thought by most definitions they won the Space Race, by being the first to have a habitable space station