Originally Posted by
teeteringhead
As we used to say in the early days of the Space Race, it's not that the Russians (at that time) were better than the Americans, but that the Russian's Germans were better than the American's Germans!
It was more along the line of the Soviet's nukes were much larger. Because their nukes were larger/heavier, they needed to develop larger/heavier lift rockets for their nukes - which ended up being more suitable to putting stuff into orbit.
Adding to that was an initial desire by the Eisenhower administration to use other than military derived rockets.