What the Soviets achieved were great accomplishments. But I bet, like the American space program, few minorities or women were involved in their space program.
Actually, the first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963 on Vostok 6. The next was also Russian, in 1982. While the USSR was pretty racist - and even ethnicist (not a word, but ...), as Ukrainians, Jews, and Chechens could tell - they didn't have much of a non-"white" population.
The US tended to draw astronauts from military services. Truman, apparently (it was before I was born), officially integrated the military in the 1940s, but it wasn't an instantaneous change. And social attitudes in many parts of the US changed even slower. Like any effort, the US space program started and proceeded with what it had, not what niggling pundits 50+ years later say they should have had. Denigrating the space program for not using what was not available, as the NYT seems to have done, is simply stupid ... unsurprising in the NYT.