The Soviets were ahead where they were ahead because Stalin choose to emphasize so-call 'old math' (mostly because an oppressed and decaying Soviet Union could not afford computers). This is the same reason such a huge percentage of the twentieth centuries' great mathematicians were from the eastern bloc. They came up with the mathematics that made it possible for one person to plot an orbit in a multiple-body system, that made that rocket engine possible, even the math behind stealth technology was developed by a Russian in the thirties.
The U.S. got to the Moon (which is not a moon, but that's another story), put out more deep space and interplanetary probes, and (until recently) had a much better safety record because it replied on 'new math', math that emphasized quickly turning any equation into one that could be run by a computer: less understanding, less elegant, more powerful, more number-crunching.
I don't know what the bleep happened to the U.S. space program after Apollo. It seems like they really haven't done anything useful since then. It is sad and I, for one, am waiting for the day when one of two things happen.
- The Chinese get their act up to the level that actual completion for something meaningful starts and NASA gets its aft in gear.
- The space program is pulled of its current 'life support' level of funding and finally laid to rest. Maybe someday someone else that really loves it will pick it up and do something with it.
On another note, the reason that whole spinning-thing won't work is because there will be mass (astronauts and whatever) moving around inside it. "Every action ...." It then costs lots of fuel not only to maintain the right facing or alignment, but also to maintain the correct position relative to your surroundings. You may remember footage of the astronauts running around the inside of Skylab? Wonder why you don't seen any astronauts doing that anymore? It's because those kinds of antics actually knocked Skylab off course. I don't know if the Soviets ever even tried that nonsense, but you can bet that if it had worked, they would have set up something spinning on one of their eight space stations.
Additionally, on the note of how long the Russian or Soviet Space agency has kept people in orbit, do remember that those were experiments in how much a human body can take. They haven't put people up for longer because of the damage those experiments did to those men. Also recall that when long-term station residents come down they are weak: these men can only barely walk. Not going to do much good on Mars if you need three months to recuperate after landing.
(Yeah, yeah, Martian gravity is low... only one month.)