During the Apollo moon missions, were the Soviets able to monitor communications and telemetry

I mean yes, they had access to radio telescopes and could receive the information coming from the spacecraft and moon, but could they interpret spacecraft conditions, etc.

YES. That's why the Soviets knew NONE of the Apollo missions was filmed on soungstage on Earth, because the telemetry came FROM THE MOON.

I worked on Apollo, and the communications frequencies were among the few things rated Secret or higher in the program. This however was not to block the Soviets, since every communications was immediately released by NASA, but to prevent every ham radio on Earth from trying to talk to them. Telemetry could also have been monitored, but unless they knew what the telemetry was connected to (heart beats, breathing rates, fuel use, battery power, O2 levels, etc 1000X etc) it would have been meaningless.

Radio voice was in the clear.
I don't know about all the telemetry but Apollo craft didn't have much computing or electrical power for fancy encryption.

As an aside, I know we really did go to the moon because if we had faked it the Russians would have called us on it. You just know they were doing everything possible to glean every bit of info they could.

Yes they were. so were all other countries and HAM radio operators who had the right equipment. The radio links were NOT encrypted.

One of the primary tracking stations was in Australia and the signals went over their telephone system to NASA.

They were able to read the signals; I doubt they were able to interpret them into units/words.... The Soviets at one time offered to track Apollo 11 for us when North America was facing away from the moon - but, we had Australia & Turkey filling in.

I think the telemetry was scrambled because during the cold war the Americans wanted to protect the Apollo space craft from sabotage.

Oh man... I don't remember. But I'd imagine that our space program was kept as secret as it possibly could. We spent TRILLIONS of wasted dollars being "at war" with the Soviets - somehow I doubt we shared any information.