The astronauts weren’t present on the Moon in darkness.

A lunar day cycle is a month long, meaning that daylight and darkness both last roughly two weeks.

This, along with the landings happening during lunar mornings, means that even during three day stays on the surface, the spacecraft never had to contend with the complete darkness of lunar night.

The answer to your question has a simple explanation. As with any great story you must develop the plot and the characters until you get to the climax. The story has to built properly, to be as believable as possible, so the story goes: we sent up rockets, we sent up a dog, then we sent up a man and then the man did a space walk, (for the record, I think those things are plausible); however, Russia took too long to get to the climax. While they were busy dunking on America in the fabulous story of the space race, NASA saw their chance to grab the glory, so they had Hollywood help them create the moon landing. They simply beat the Russians to the punch. And if the Russians faked any part of their space exploration, then that is precisely why they wouldn’t have called out America’s moon landing as fake, because this would cause people around the world to question the validity of the claims these two competing nations were making.
If people started questioning the official narratives and the “science”, then it would cause more people to distrust their governments, and distrust those who claim to be experts in their fields.
And those in power can’t have that, now can they?

It’s that simple.

I’m no expert but to my way s seeing this conundrum, the Saturn V was meant to take landing modules, a rover, crew, supplies and a whole lot more shit, whereas the soviet rocket was oly tasked with taking the moonwalker’ (ie no crew, no life support, etc), therefore only needed to be a fraction of the americans effort. I recall the old story about NASA spending a million dollars developing a pen the would write in space, wheras the soviets just used a pencil! Consider the different philosphies when comparing the two sides rockets!

The Saturn V was capable of hauling a total payload of 43.000 kg into Moon orbit. The whole Lunokhod I unit weighed in at 5.600 kg (the rover itself 756 kg) – that’s less than 1/7th of Saturn V’s capacity. Maybe the Lunokhod rocket only had to be 1/7th the size of the Apollo one as well?
I’m no expert on this, but maybe that’s one thing that should be considered.
Gererally speaking, we’re constantly being lied to for ages, and bombarded by propaganda of all sorts. So yeah – it’s absoutely possible that the Soviets lied about their space program just as well…

My thoughts exactly!