Wording i've seen. "USA is the only country to successfully land on Mars". "Chinas Tiawan-1 will make china the second country to successfully land on Mars." etc. The wording is subtle and arguably accurate but the omission is obvious.
Here's an exact example of this i just read: "If successful, China will become the second country, after the US, to land and operate a rover on the Martian surface." Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22276153/china-reaches-ma...
The above is completely true. Whilst the Soviet Mars3 lander landed and it did transmit telemetry after landing its rover failed to deploy and since it was in a dust storm it didn't last long at all, it only lasted 20 seconds. So you can say limit your definition to exclude Mars3. Still if you're talking about the history of space missions to mars limiting the definition very precisely to exclude this is odd.
It's a bit like if the USA landed a probe on Venus tomorrow that happened to transmit for more than an hour and then running headlines "NASAs probe is the first probe to land on Venus and transmit for more than an hour". It's not at all wrong. But geez that's a very interesting way to define things so that you don't have to say 'second'.
> Walter: “Am I wrong?”
> The Dude: “... You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole.”
> Walter: “Okay then.”
It's kind of a silly premise, but this was the single most memorable antagonist for Steve Austin from my childhood viewing of the show. And...I don't remember how I knew this, or how much it was discussed in connection with the show, but I knew that there really were Soviet Venus surface probes that this story was (very loosely) based on.
1965: First landing on another planet (crash)
1967: First spacecraft to transmit data from another planet's atmosphere.
1970: First spacecraft to transmit data from another planet's surface.
It's amazing they did all this in the 60s and 70s.
The Cold War was great for tech investment and research without a clear profit motive.
I like to bring up Venus whenever Mars is in the news. It's so much more interesting to me than the tiny, dark dust bowl we keep probing.
There's stuff you should just know about if you're in a field even if you're not familiar with it or an expert in it.
Settling Venus is also possible, but it's less accessible due to the Earth-like gravity well, and it's easier to imagine humans living relatively comfortably and self-sufficiently in a Martian Hobbit hole than on giant zeppelins in the atmosphere of Venus.
Venus is more mysterious simply because it's harder to see surface features under that atmosphere and the conditions on the surface are very strange and hard to imagine.
It definitely did not get the media attention that NASA missions got, but it seems likely that news of NASA missions didn't get much play in the USSR either. Cold war was still on, as you say.
So maybe it's a myth that it was ignored or suppressed?