yea, after all, americans took a massive hit to thier pride being beaten to first in space etc, what better way to dampen Russian spirit than to stage such an event to give them a few more years to actually do it for real, making out it's actually a 3rd time etc to rub it in, despite likely being the first. I'm certain if the Russian had bothered to go just after americans faked visit, they would have found no evidence at all of the yank's mission and really showed the yanks up to as a bunch of liars... which would have destroyed the nations pride for the rest of time. It would be interesting to note that the americans would still have to cover thier asses by putting a site there for the future visitors, so one of the missions would have to have been real to be able to dump gear that people will expect to find.
The conspiracy will still be there for centuries, due to a heck of a lot of suspect data provded by NASA, one of the best examples being the guy who actually built the camcorders for the moon walks has testafied that the picture quality was impossibly low for the conditions and specs of the camcorders he designed and tested, especially considering the far better definition of future missions using the same camcorders, he even thinks it very suspect that NASA only ever offered deliberately low quality footage to cover the fact it was staged and that direct mission feed still has not been allowed out of storage, all the footage out in the normal world's media is shot second hand from a wall screen projector at NASA which drops the resolution quality even lower.
I guess in about 8 or 9 years when it hits the 50years mark it will have to be released directly, though i'm betting that nasa will say its been degraded beyond use or the warehouse will catch fire... or will reek of touch ups and missing key frames... like many of the fake touched up photos NASA released at the time.