Soviet Rocketry

Soviet N1 Lunar Rocket
The N1 was the competitor to the Saturn V during the space race. Four were launched; all four crashed. The final crash obliterated the only launch pad, delaying the Soviet moon program for 18 months, which decisively let USA win the race. The N1 compensated for unreliable engines via massive redundancy. It had 30 engines on the main stage and a failsafe system known as KORD to shut down failed engines. On the first launch, KORD itself failed and mistakenly shut down all the engines.

Encyclopedia Astronautica: N1 Rocket
The interesting part of this page is the footnotes. Many excerpts from the Soviet point of view:

Kamanin's thoughts on first Saturn V launch: The first Saturn V and Surveyor 6 have been launched by the Americans. Kamanin catalogues why the Americans are beating them: bad organisation, on the parts of Ustinov, Smirnov, Pashkov, Malinovskiy, and Grechko; technical errors and an undisciplined approach to the fulfilment of government decrees concerning the Soyuz and N1 on the parts of Chief Designers Korolev and Mishin; lack of coordination between the institutes and design bureaux compared to the United States; and finally, the Americans are spending several times more money than has been dedicated to the Soviet space program.
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The second successful launch of the Saturn V stunned the Soviet engineers. They could not believe the variety and volume of data telemetered back in real-time to the launch centre. They viewed with jealousy the launch room set-up at Cape Canaveral - where each engineering speciality could sit in their own comfortable chair, viewing data as the booster ascended on a computer screen.
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Kamanin considers the Apollo 13 mission: He believes it was a 'true test' of American technical capability in space. The saving of the American astronauts demonstrated the robust redundancy in the American Saturn V - Apollo design, as compared with the Soviet N1-L3. The latter, Kamanin remarks, is a bad launch vehicle, boosting a bad spacecraft.
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The VPK Military-Industrial Commission and the Central Committee of he Party discussed the matter of delaying further N1 tests until completely redesigned engines became available. Back came the ritual reply -- a Soviet manned lunar landing must be achieved by the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Lenin (April 22, 1970). On that date a Soviet man would plant the Red Banner and unveil a bust of Lenin on the lunar surface.

Nedelin Disaster
The Nedelin disaster was the worst space-related disaster of all time. Among the dead were seven leading dignitaries of the Soviet space program. 92 people were killed when a toxically-fueled rocket exploded on the launch pad during preparations. The dignitaries were lounging around on the tarmac, "supervising" the workers (which violated every safety code on the Russian books) when one of the engines on the second stage ignited, with predictable results. Remarkably, the disaster was was kept secret for 40 years until the 1990's.

Soviet Buran Space Shuttle
Good one-pager (actually, many of the one-pagers at aerospaceweb are quite good) about the Soviet Buran shuttle.