Did Anyone Actually Fly Into Space Before Yuri Gagarin?

On April 12, 1961 at 9:07 AM Moscow Time, a Soviet Vostok rocket blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and soared into the sky. Minutes later, the rocket reached an altitude of 200 kilometres, placing its payload, 27-year-old Air Force Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Gagarin circled the earth once before reentering the atmosphere, landing by parachute near the city of Engels, Saratov Oblast. Within hours, newspapers around the world were trumpeting the stupendous news: for the first time in history, mankind had slipped the surly bonds of earth and travelled in the mysterious realm of outer space.

…or had he? Unlike its American counterpart, which carried out its missions in full view of the public, the Soviet space program was notoriously shrouded in military secrecy. Launches were not announced ahead of time and only made public if they were successful – giving the illusion of an unbroken string of Soviet space successes. Even the identities of the first Soviet cosmonauts remained a closely-guarded secret until the moment they reached orbit. Against this shadowy backdrop of paranoia and secrecy, rumours began to emerge that Yuri Gagarin was not, in fact, the first man to be launched into space. Others, it was claimed, had been sent up before him but perished in the attempt, with their missions – and identities – being covered up by the Soviet authorities. But is any of this true? Did the Soviets actually cover up the deaths of its cosmonauts, or are these accusations nothing more than a 60-year old cosmic conspiracy theory? Well, take your borscht pills and put your helmet on, Comrade Tom, as dive into the murky and controversial world of the “lost” or “phantom” cosmonauts.

Stories of lost cosmonauts predate Yuri Gagarin’s historic 1961 flight. Though the Soviets claimed many early space firsts – including launching the first artificial earth satellite, placing the first living organism in orbit, and sending the first probes to the moon – they were relatively slow to put together a manned space program, selecting their first slate of 20 cosmonauts a full year after NASA revealed its Mercury Seven astronauts. The names of these cosmonauts and even the very existence of a Soviet manned space program were shrouded in official secrecy, leading to widespread speculation by world news and intelligence agencies. For example, in November 1959, engineer Anatoly Blagonravov was forced to officially deny the existence of a Soviet manned space program. As a United States Senate committee on aeronautical and space sciences later reported:

“Blagonravov termed reports of a training programme for Russian astronauts ‘ungrounded and stemming mainly from journalistic imagination.’ He said Russia has no man-in-space programme as such – just a programme on flight safety…Blagonravov’s denial of a specific man-in-space programme at the ARS [American Rocket Society] meeting closes with earlier statements by Professor Andrei Kuznetsov, head of the Soviet aerospace medical programme. Kuznetsov told delegates to the 52nd General Conference of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale in Moscow last summer that the Soviets have selected four astronauts for the first manned space capsule programme.”

The following month, the Italian news agency Continentale published information purportedly leaked by a high-ranking Czechoslovak Communist official, revealing that the Soviet Union not only had a manned space program, but had even conducted a series of unofficial – and unsuccessful – manned spaceflight. According to this source, as early as 1957 four cosmonauts named Alexei Ledovsky, Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin, and Maria Gromova were killed during suborbital flights aboard modified R-5A ballistic missiles. This story was further corroborated by German rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth, then living in the United States. 60 years on, no further evidence of Soviet suborbital spaceflight has come to light, and the original source of this story remains a mystery. And in any case, the R-5A was not large enough to carry a human on even a suborbital flight, though animal payloads may have been on board.

As the Space Race gathered momentum and the superpowers drew ever closer to the goal of placing a man in orbit, more and more alleged details about the Soviet space programme began to appear in the popular media. In the December 1960 issue of RAF Flying Review, an article claimed that:

“Little is known of the Russian astronauts or even how many are undergoing training, Names that have been revealed include Mikhailov, Grachov, Begloniev, Kachur, Zovodosky, and Vladimir Ilyushin, the son of the well-known aircraft designer.”

The Vladimir Ilyushin turns up again and again in rumours about lost cosmonauts. On April 10, 1961 – two days before Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight – British correspondent Dennis Ogden published an article in the communist newspaper Daily Worker claiming that Ilyushin had been launched into space on April 7 but had been severely injured, causing the Soviet authorities to cover up his mission and launch Gagarin five days later. A similar story was told by French broadcaster Eduard Bobrovsky and the American newspaper U.S. News & World Report, claiming that the alleged flight had actually taken place in March and that Ilyushin had been put in a coma. Later theorists claimed that Ilyushin had accidentally landed in the People’s Republic of China and was still imprisoned there, or that Yuri Gagarin had not even flown in space and was simply swapped in at the last minute as propaganda cover for Ilyushin’s ill-fated mission.

In reality, while Vladimir Ilyushin was a real person – the eldest son of famous aircraft designer Sergei Ilyushin – he was not a cosmonaut, serving most of his career as an Air Force officer, a test pilot for the Sukhoi and Tupolev design bureaus, and later the founder and first president of the Soviet Rugby Federation. Nor was he killed in the line of duty, dying of natural causes in 2010 at the ripe old age of 83. Furthermore, official Soviet records obtained after the fall of the Iron Curtain reveal no evidence of any Vostok rocket launch in March or early April 1961, nor of Ilyushin’s involvement in any manned space missions.

This story about Ilyushin’s alleged mission and its subsequent cover-up angered the Soviets, with space journalist Yaroslav Golovanov writing:

“I initially felt a certain irony and disgust. This is a well thought out anti-Soviet propaganda campaign, whose authors have been striving for many years now to dupe millions of people and belittle our country’s [page 168] scientific and technical achievements…. It is quite natural and only to be expected that our enemies should desire to undermine the significance of [Gagarin’s flight], to find some flaws in it, and to compromise it in some way…. Reports of this kind were designed for utterly ignorant and obtuse readers. I repeat: this is a campaign.”

Ironically, the originator of the story, Dennis Ogden, was a devoted communist with little motivation to discredit the Soviet space program. Rather, it is more likely Ogden cooked up what he saw as a compelling story from a few threadbare pieces of evidence. Ogden happened to live in the same Moscow apartment block as Vladimir Ilyushin, who at the time was recovering from injuries sustained in a car crash on June 8, 1960. He thus likely combined Ilyushin’s injuries with rumours then circulating of a cosmonaut killed in a training accident – more on that later – to weave his tale of a spaceflight gone wrong.

Other stories of lost cosmonauts originated from alleged signals from Soviet spacecraft intercepted by radio amateurs – and none were more prolific in this regard than Achille and Gian Judica-Cordiglia, two brothers from the Italian city of Turin. In the late 1950s, the brothers set up a makeshift radio listening station in an old German bunker known as the Torre Bert, which they used to listen in on Soviet satellites. Turin was an ideal location for this activity, being the only part of Western Europe which lay along the orbital path of Soviet spacecraft. From October 1957 onward, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers used their makeshift equipment to intercept telemetry and voice transmissions from satellites such as Sputnik 1 and 2 and manned space missions such as Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1 and John Glenn’s Friendship 7. But they also claimed to have received stranger, more disturbing signals. On November 28, 1960, five months before Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight, the Bochum space observatory in West Germany announced the interception of a possible satellite signal. As Gian Judica-Cordiglia later recalled:

“Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen. It was a signal we recognised immediately as Morse code – SOS.”

But there was something odd about this signal. Rather than flying by overhead, it seemed to be coming from a single point in the sky, and slowly moving away from the earth. Eventually, the SOS faded to silence. This recording fuelled speculation that the Soviets had attempted to launch a cosmonaut – rumoured to be named Gennady Mikhailov – but that the spacecraft had failed to enter orbit, instead flying off into deep space.

On February 2, 1961, the brothers were scanning Russian frequencies when they picked up a transmission from an orbiting satellite. It sounded like a human voice, wheezing and fighting for breath. Strangely, no Soviet space launches were recorded during this period; the last official launch was Korabl-Sputnik 2 – an unmanned test version of the Vostok capsule – on August 19, 1960, while the next was the Venus probe Venera 1 on February 12, 1961.

And on May 19, 1961, the brothers recorded their most disturbing transmission yet, which sounded like a female voice shouting:

“Come in… come in… come in… Listen! Come in! Talk to me! I am hot! I am hot! Come in! What? Forty-five? What? Fifty? Yes. Yes, yes, breathing. Oxygen, oxygen… I am hot. This… isn’t this dangerous?” Transmission begins now. Forty-one. Yes, I feel hot. I feel hot, it’s all… it’s all hot. I can see a flame! I can see a flame! I can see a flame! Thirty-two… thirty-two. Am I going to crash? Yes, yes I feel hot… I am listening, I feel hot, I will re-enter. I’m hot!”

Over the following decade, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers made dozens of similar recordings, propelling them to worldwide fame. They conducted dozens of interviews and even appeared on and won the Italian version of the TV quiz show Mastermind. Their prize? A chance to visit NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. But while at the time U.S. Intelligence agencies thought their claims of secret Soviet spaceflights to be plausible, more recent evaluations of the so-called “Torre Bert recordings” have cast serious doubt on the Judica-Cordiglia brothers’ work. In many of the recordings, the alleged cosmonauts – who would all have been highly-trained military pilots – frequently break official communications protocol, use incorrect technical terminology, or make grammatical mistakes that no native Russian speaker would make. Later in life, the brothers admitted that pressure to produce results led them to embellish or even forge some of the recordings, but they insisted that most of them were genuine. The truth of the matter has never been determined.

But the Judica-Cordiglia brothers were hardly the only source of lost cosmonaut stories. In 1960, American science fiction author Robert Heinlein wrote an article titled Pravda Means ‘Truth’, in which he claimed that while visiting Vilnius, Soviet Lithuania, on May 15, he was told by a group of Army cadets that the Soviets had launched a man into space that day but that the government had kept the mission secret. The date of Heinlein’s claim corresponds perfectly with the launch of Korabl-Sputnik 1, first test flight of the Vostok spacecraft that would eventually carry Yuri Gagarin and five other cosmonauts into space. The four-day mission was largely successful, but when controllers tried to bring the spacecraft home, the retrorockets fired in the wrong orientation and the capsule failed to reenter as planned. The spacecraft eventually decayed from orbit two and a half later on September 5, 1962, breaking up into multiple pieces as it reentered the atmosphere. One large piece landed on a street corner in the city of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where the impact site is now marked by a steel ring embedded in the pavement.

Korabl-Sputnik 1 was followed by another test flight on July 28, 1960, with a pair of dogs named Bars and Lisichka on board. Unfortunately, one of the rocket’s strap-on boosters failed 19 seconds after takeoff and the entire vehicle disintegrated. The launch escape system or LES separated the capsule as designed, but the parachutes failed to fully deploy and the capsule impacted the ground at high speed, killing both dogs. Two weeks later on August 19, Korabl-Sputnik 2 was successfully launched, orbiting the earth for one day before reentering the atmosphere and parachuting to the ground. Aboard were forty mice, two rats, and two dogs named Belka and Strelka – the first organisms to be launched into orbit and safely recovered. Korabl-Sputnik 3, launched on December 1, 1960, was also largely successful, but an error during retrofire placed the capsule on a trajectory where it risked being captured and inspected by foreign powers. The decision was thus made to self-destruct the capsule, killing the two dogs Pcholka and Mushka aboard. Two more fully successful test flights followed: Korabl-Sputnik 4 on March 9, 1961, carrying mice, guinea pigs, and a dog named Chernushka; and Korabl-Sputnik 5 on March 25, carrying a dog named Zvezdochka.

In addition to animals and test instrumentation, all the Korabl-Sputnik flights carried a life-sized human dummy nicknamed “Ivan Ivanovich” – the Russian equivalent of “John Doe” – to test the Sokol space suit and the capsule’s life support system and ejection seat. Unlike the American Mercury capsule which splashed down in the ocean, the Vostok capsule was designed to land in the vast territory of the Soviet Union. As the capsule could not carry a parachute large enough to safely land both itself and the cosmonaut inside, the cosmonaut instead ejected at an altitude of 7 kilometres and parachuted to the ground separately from the capsule. Interestingly, the Soviets kept this aspect of their spaceflights secret for many years since the official rules of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale or FAI regarding spaceflight records specified that the astronaut had to land with their spacecraft. Later, however, these rules were amended to recognize Soviet spaceflight achievements.

Recognizing that the lifelike Ivan Ivanovich dummy might be mistaken for a dead cosmonaut – or worse, an American U2 spy plane pilot – mission planners wrote the word maket or “dummy” in large letters on the back of the spacesuit and on a piece of foam rubber tucked under the helmet visor. In addition to evaluating the life support system, Ivan Ivanovich also carried a tape recorder to test the capsule’s communications equipment. Once again, mission planners anticipated that ordinary voice signals might be intercepted and misinterpreted as evidence that the spacecraft was manned, so to avoid any confusion they chose to broadcast a recording of the Piatnitsky Choir mixed with a single voice reading a recipe for cabbage soup. Finally, the launch crews at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan opted to eschew the classic launch countdown. As one designer at the OKB-1 design bureau later explained:

“We rejected a numerical countdown, fearing western radio stations would monitor the human voice and raise a clamour throughout the world alleging that Russia has secretly put a man into orbit.”

Interestingly, the rocket countdown was originally invented for the 1929 German science fiction film Frau Im Mond and subsequently adopted by German rocket engineers during the Second World War for the development of the infamous V-2 ballistic missile. When those same engineers were brought to the United States after the war as part of Operation Paperclip, they brought the tradition of the countdown with them. In addition to the practical considerations, Russian engineers also saw the countdown as a frivolous piece of theatre and preferred to unceremoniously launch their rockets at the appointed time.

Yet despite these precautions, many radio operators like the Judica-Cordiglia brothers misinterpreted the signals from the Korabl-Sputniks as coming from a living cosmonaut. And the Soviet planners’ fears about the realistic appearance of Ivan Ivanovich proved well-founded. When Korabl-Sputnik 5 landed near the village of Bolshaya Sosnova on March 25, 1961, as predicted the villagers mistook the limp space-suited figure for an American spy plane pilot, and grew agitated when the recovery crew refused to help him. It was not until an elder stepped forward and confirmed the figure was in fact a mannequin that they finally calmed down. Though we can never know for sure, it is possible that many phantom cosmonaut rumours from this era originated from distorted reports of the recovery of Ivan Ivanovich dummies.

But while most of the early phantom cosmonaut stories were either pure fabrications or gross exaggerations based on scanty evidence, at least some contained a kernel of truth. For example, in early 1963 the Canadian Press Agency ran an article by Arthur Karday, Russian correspondent for the Vancouver Sun, containing a translated excerpt from the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. The article, which covered the recent dual Vostok 3 and 4 mission of cosmonauts Pavel Popovich and Andriyan Nikolayev, read in part:

“One of the truly magnificent and awe-inspiring monuments to the human spirit in the self-sacrifice of two other heavenly heroes – Andreyev and Dolgov. One of them Dolgov, was destined not to return from the stratosphere. He, like the Georgian eagle, sacrificed his life in order to save hundreds and perhaps thousands of other spacemen through his heroism.”

The alleged cosmonauts named in the article were Major Yevgeny Andreyev and Colonel Pyotr Dolgov, officers in the Soviet Air Force and experienced high-altitude parachutists. Dolgov, along with Ivan Kachur, Alexis Belokonev, and Alexey Grachov, were featured in a 1959 article in the Soviet magazine Ogoniok, where they were shown testing various pieces of high-altitude equipment including pressure suits. Since at the time the existence of a Soviet manned space programme was still a closely-guarded secret, it was widely assumed that these men were secretly training to be cosmonauts. This claim was repeated in the 1961 book Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space by Wilfred Burchett and Anthony Purdy – the first authoritative western account of the Soviet space program.

Around the time Karday’s article was published, rumours had begun to circulate that Dolgov had been killed during a secret orbital spaceflight on October 11, 1960 – six months before Yuri Gagarin’s successful flight. As it turned out, this rumour was partially true: Pyotr Dolgov was indeed killed in the line of duty – though not until two years later and not while flying a space mission. Though Dolgov was associated with the Soviet manned space programme, he was never selected as a cosmonaut and was instead involved in the testing of various components of the Vostok capsule’s escape and survival equipment, including the Sokol space suit, the ejection seat, and the parachute system. Some of these tests involved dropping mockup capsules from aircraft, while others involved jumping or ejecting from a Volga helium balloon, which could carry a spherical pressurized gondola with two parachutists into the upper stratosphere.

At 7:44 AM on November 1, 1962, a Volga balloon carrying Pyotr Dolgov and Yevgeny Adreyev lifted off from Volsk, Saratov Oblast, and slowly rose into the sky. Two and a half hours later, as the balloon approached an altitude of 25,500 metres, Andreyev prepared to eject:

“Having depressurized my section of the cabin, I waved goodbye to Dolgov who was getting ready for the jump behind a transparent airtight partition, and ejected into the void of the stratosphere. I didn’t feel the usual swirl of the air stream. To prevent the front glass of my pressure helmet from freezing over I turned on my back and saw the black velvet of the night sky studded with the countless diamonds of bluish-silver stars. Plummeting to about 12 kilometres at some 900 km/h I began to feel the growing resistance of the atmosphere. I turned again to face the earth, and after free-falling spread-eagled for a while, I pulled the ripcord.

After a successful soft landing – I even managed to remain on my feet – my first thought was for Dolgov. I looked up and saw the canopy of his chute – everything was okay. And it simply couldn’t be otherwise; an ace parachutist, Pyotr had tested quite a few sophisticated ejection seats and capsules, had ejected from planes at supersonic speeds, and had taken part in many record-breaking and delayed-opening jumps.

However, a pilot of a support party plane monitoring the descent reported to the control post that Dolgiv appeared limp in the harness. I felt a knot in my throat.

An ambulance was at the landing spot before Dolgov’s body touched the ground. A small hole in his pressure helmet told the story, I seemed that when leaving the nacelle Pyotr had hit some metal part with his helmet and had been instantly killed by the depressurization. Later, a special timer had automatically opened his parachute.”

Dolgov’s ill-fated jump was the 1,409^th of his career. In the wake of the disaster, Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev ordered the hatch on the Vostok spacecraft enlarged and a 2-second delay between the hatch being jettisoned and the cosmonaut ejecting to prevent any repeat of Dolgov’s tragic accident.

By 1962, stories of lost cosmonauts were so ubiquitous that the irritated Soviets were forced to try and set the record straight. When asked about lost cosmonauts during his 1962 tour of the United States, Gherman Titov – the second man to orbit the earth – replied:

“I have heard about that. According to your newspapers, the soviet union has lost not one, but five cosmonauts. They even named them. We had no cosmonauts in our country before the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin.”

And when, in 1963, the New York Journal American published a story claiming that parachutists Alexei Belokonev and Gennady Mikhailov were among the cosmonauts whose deaths had been covered up by the government, Alexei Adzhubei, editor-in-chief of the Soviet Newspaper Izvestia, brought the still very much alive men into his office to be photographed. This photograph was widely circulated in the Soviet media as a riposte to stories about lost cosmonauts. Belokonev and Mikhailov also wrote an angry letter to the New York Journal American editor William Randolph Hearst, Jr, but they were ignored.

Yet in spite of these denials, it is now known that the Soviet government did indeed cover up many accidents and disasters related to its space program. For example, on October 24, 1960, a prototype R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile exploded while being prepared for a test flight at Baikonur Cosmodrome, incinerating over 150 people including the director of the test, Chief Marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Nedelin. The disaster, now known as the Nedelin Catastrophe, was immediately covered up by the Soviet authorities, who claimed that Marshall Nedelin had died in a plane crash. The truth about the incident was not officially acknowledged until 1989 -a nd for more on this, please check out our previous video Catastrophe: the Soviet Space Program’s Darkest Day over on our sister channel Highlight History.

And in the 1970s, American journalist and space historian James Oberg, author of The Red Star in Orbit, uncovered compelling evidence that the identity of at least some of the original cosmonauts had been covered up. In May 1961, a group of leading figures in the Soviet manned space program, including chief designer Sergei Korolev and a number of cosmonauts, posed for a photograph at the Black Sea resort town of Sochi. The original photograph, circulated by the Soviet government, shows five cosmonauts: Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov, Andriyan Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich, and Valery Bykovsky. However, in an earlier version uncovered by Oberg, a sixth, unnamed cosmonaut appears in the background – a figure crudely airbrushed out of the official photograph. Erasing politically inconvenient figures from photographs was a common practice in the Soviet Union. For example, a famous photograph of Vladimir Lenin speaking on May 5, 1920, was progressively depopulated as key figures in the image fell out of favour; while the image of Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD secret police, was removed from a widely-circulated photograph of Josef Stalin after he was purged and executed in 1940. It would be another decade before the identity of the erased cosmonaut finally came to light. In 1986, on the 25th Anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok 1 mission, space journalist Yaroslav Golovanov revealed his name to be

Grigori Nelyubov; and while he was not killed during a secret spaceflight as initially suspected, his story is nonetheless a tragic one.

A member of the so-called “vanguard six” cosmonauts chosen to make the first manned spaceflights, Nelyubov was a boastful and arrogant man, prone to heavy drinking and combative behaviour. While his excellent performance during cosmonaut training had long kept him in prime rotation for a Vostok mission, his vices finally caught up with him on March 27, 1963. That evening, Nelyubov, along with fellow cosmonauts Ivan Anikeyev and Valentin Filatyev, left the cosmonaut training centre at Star City for a drunken night on the town at the nearby Chkalovsky railway station. The trio got so rowdy that the owner of the station bar called the nearby air force base to have them removed, whereupon the cosmonauts decided to leave of their own accord. On arriving back at Star City, the cosmonauts discovered that they had forgotten their gate passes, and got into a heated argument with the security officer on duty. Nelyubov, particularly drunk and pugnacious, insisted that he was an important cosmonaut and aggressively demanded to be let through. The duty officer duly arrested the three and reported their transgressions to their commanding officer, General Nikolai Kamanin.

The next day Nelyubov, Anikeyev, and Filatyev were hauled before Kamanin, who offered to let them off with a reprimand if they made an official apology. While Anikeyev and Filatyev readily agreed, Nelyubov stubbornly refused. Kamanin referred the matter to the other cosmonauts, who voted unanimously to expel the trio from the manned space program. The official dismissal order was handed out on April 17.

On being expelled, all three former cosmonauts resumed their previous careers as Air Force officers. Valentin Filatyev retired from the Air Force in November 1969 with the rank of Major, then worked at the state industrial design bureau in Orel and as a civil defense instructor before dying of natural causes in 1989. Ivan Anikeyev was posted to Russia’s northern territory and remained in active service until 1965 whereupon he served as a ground controller before retiring with the rank of Captain. According to fellow cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, at one point a thief stole Anikeyev’s keys and used his car to run over a pedestrian before returning the keys. Anikeyev was arrested and imprisoned for a year before he was finally found innocent. Nonetheless, he was placed on reserve status and never flew again, dying of cancer in 1992.

Meanwhile, Grigori Nebyulov found it difficult to cope with the shame of being expelled from the cosmonaut corps. On returning to Air Force service, he was assigned to an interceptor squadron in Vladivostok in Russia’s far east. Here, he fell into a deep depression and began drinking heavily. In late 1963, cosmonaut Pavel Popovich visited Nelyubov in Vladivostok and suggested that if he apologized to Kamanin, he might be returned to flight status. Swallowing his pride, Nelyubov travelled to Moscow to deliver his apology, but General Kamanin was too busy to see him and the meeting never took place. In early 1966, Nelyubov sent an appeal to Sergei Korolev, only to discover that the Chief Designer had suddenly died while undergoing routine abdominal surgery. Desperate for any kind of meaningful flight assignment, Nelyubov repeatedly applied to be a test pilot, but was continually denied.

Eventually the shame and disappointment became too much for Nelyubov to bear, and on February 17, 1967 he snuck out of his house and trudged through the snowy night to have a drink in the nearby town of Ippolitovka. While crossing a rail bridge, a passing train kicked up a heavy wooden beam and launched it into Nelyubov’s head, killing him instantly. While his death was officially ruled an accident, his widow insisted it was suicide, claiming that he had left her a note.

Nelyubov was buried as an Air Force officer, his status as a former cosmonaut being expunged from official records. It was a tragic end for a young man with so much potential. As his friend and colleague Pavel Popovich later stated:

“He experienced his dismissal as very painful – a great amount of pain. It resulted in a very rapid drop in his spirit. I talked to him on several occasions and sometimes he even accused me of being responsible for his dismissal, because at the time I had been a commander of the detachment…of the team. I tried to prove to him that I wasn’t involved and had nothing to do with his dismissal, but he didn’t believe me.

…if I was rude with you and if I am an honest, decent man, all I have to do is have the courage to apologize. I would say ‘Please excuse me, I just exceeded my powers; I was over-excited, please excuse me.’ Nebyulov didn’t do that; that’s why he suffered. It was the result of his own fault.”

I was probably the first one to hear about his death, but I decided not to fly down to his funeral. And even if all the cosmonauts had known about his death, nobody would have gone. Usually, we did not forgive the betrayal. And he betrayed us.”

Nebyulov would not be the first nor the last cosmonaut expelled from the Soviet space program. During the period of initial training in 1960 and 1961, Anatoliy Kartashov developed skin bleeding during centrifuge tests, while Valentin Varlamov dislocated his spine while diving into a shallow stream. Both were dismissed from the programme for medical reasons. And, just like Nelyubov, Anikeyev, and Filatyev a year later, in 1962 cosmonaut Mars Rafikov was expelled for disciplinary reasons.

But while most early cosmonauts left the program very much alive, one met a much grimmer fate.

Rumours had long circulated that a cosmonaut had died in a training accident just prior to Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight. In 1982, Russian emigre S. Tiktin told a West German anti-Soviet magazine of a cosmonaut who was fatally burned in a fire in an oxygen chamber, giving the victim’s name as Boyko or Boychenko. Two years later, a Russian surgeon named Dr. Vladimir Golyakhovsky corroborated this story, claiming that the burned cosmonaut had been brought to the Botkin Hospital outside Moscow where he was then working. But it was not until 1986 that Yarolslav Golovanov officially confirmed the story and revealed the unfortunate cosmonaut’s name: Valentin Vasilyevich Bondarenko.

Born on Februrary 16, 1937 in Kharkov – then the capital of Ukraine – Bondarenko was the youngest son of Vasily Griorevich and Olga Ivanovna Bondareko, who worked in a local fur factory. In 1941, Bondarenko’s father joined a partisan unit to fend off the German invasion of the Soviet union, winning seven medals of distinction for his service. Kharkov suffered heavily during the war, changing hands several times and being almost completely destroyed before it was liberated by Soviet forces in August 1943. After the war, Bondarenko finished secondary school while taking flying lessons at his local aero club, graduating in 1954. He was then conscripted into the army and enrolled in the air force college at Voroshilovgrad – modern-day Lugansk. While deployed to Grozny in modern-day Chechnya, he married his sweetheart Galina Senenovna Rykova and welcomed his first child – a son named Aleksandr – in 1956. In 1957 Bondarenko graduated from Armavir Higher Air Force Pilots School with the rank of Lieutenant and spent the next two years flying MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighters with the No.868 unit of 175 fighter regiment based at Kaunus in the Baltic Union Republics, accumulating 288 flying hours.

On December 26, 1959, Bondarenko became the first in his unit to be interviewed as a potential cosmonaut candidate, later travelling to Moscow to undergo a gruelling battery of medical tests. In March 1960, he was selected as part of the first group of 20 cosmonauts, and reported to the Cosmonaut Training Centre at Star City, northwest of Moscow. At only 24 years of age, he was the youngest person in history to be selected for spaceflight.

Bondarenko was well-liked by his fellow cosmonauts, who fondly remembered his excellent singing voice and boundless passion for sports such as table-tennis and soccer. As Pavel Popovich later recalled:

“He was a very good-natured, merry fellow. He was nicknamed Zvonochek (Tinkerbell), but I cannot remember why.”

Cosmonaut training at Star City was an intensive affair, comprising long days of technical lectures; physical training including gymnastics, hockey, basketball, and cross-country skiing; high-g training in centrifuges, wilderness survival training, simulated missions in a mockup of the Vostok capsule, zero-g training in a specially modified Tupolev Tu-104 aircraft, and parachute training. But the ordeal that the cosmonauts feared most was the so-called “chamber of silence” at the Centre for Biomedical Problems in Moscow, designed to test the psychological effects of isolation during a long spaceflight. This consisted of a large pressure chamber with a heavy steel door mounted on rubber shock absorbers to isolate it from vibration. The metal walls were soundproof, while the interior could only be viewed through a pair of thick glass portholes or a closed-circuit television system; once a cosmonaut was sealed inside, they were completely cut off from the outside world.

The interior of the chamber was sparsely furnished, with a small metal bed, a wooden table, a chair designed to look like the Vostok capsule ejection seat, a toilet, and basic cooking utensils including an electric hot plate and a saucepan for heating up canned food. A telegraph key was provided for communication with the test monitors, while a board with black and red numbered squares mounted on the wall for mental agility tests. The pressure inside the chamber could be varied to simulate different altitudes, and various noises piped in to test the subject’s reactions. For the sake of comparison, some subjects were allowed reading material while others were not, the latter being provided with alternate activities such as coloured pencils or blocks of wood and a carving knife. All the while, the subjects wore an array of bio-sensors to monitor their physiological reactions.

The first cosmonaut to brave the chamber of silence was Valery Bykovsky. As Yevgeny Karpov, head of cosmonaut training, later recalled:

“How Valery felt I didn’t know, but we were all a bit worried, This was the first time one of our men was to enter that unknown realm of silence. There was no danger; watchful researchers would be there all the time. What troubled us was something else – how would the first man react? The behaviour of the rest hinged largely on that . Registering instruments of the latest type kept constant watch. Valery behaved strangely at first. He seemed to be in an unreasonable hurry. Fished with one thing, he moved to another after only a moment’s thought. He reached suddenly for the telegraph key and hurriedly began to send the message ‘…air temperature…pressure…humidity.’

But the initial excitement subsided as soon as he adjusted to the situation. He began to work according to schedule, rationally and without undue haste. He kept an eye on the instruments and reported from time to time. He skilfully repaired one of the devices that went out of order. When he was not busy at assigned tasks, he wrote and sketched.

The pressure was changed several times and the routine disturbed by bright shots of light and harsh sounds, but he reacted rationally and in good time to all disturbances. He slept soundly, awoke exactly on schedule, and moved promptly to his assigned tasks. Valery came through the test with flying colours and returned from his ‘cosmic’ voyage in perfect health and good spirits.”

Different cosmonauts reacted differently to the chamber, and had different strategies for coping with the isolation. As Gherman Titov recalled:

“It is quiet, very quiet. But the word does not really describe the situation. Complete absence of sound. Not a tap, not a rustle, not a splash, not a sigh. Such absolute silence takes some getting used to; one must acclimatize oneself to it, preserve what the doctors call one’s neuropsychiatric equilibrium. A glance at my temporary residence and its scanty furniture. A small armchair at a table. A special switchboard and, beside it, a television camera. Everything needed for a long duration flight lies readily to hand- food, water, living utensils, books to read, a notebook.

I make entries in the logbook and perform a number of other tasks. It is just like a real flight. I know I must keep watch with faultless accuracy, and not so much because I am being observed by television camera as togged used to maintaining a steady rhythm of life in such conditions.”

Titov spent his spare time reciting the poetry of Alexander Pushkin and mentally disassembling and reassembling a car. He also surprised the test monitors by finding a more efficient way to cook his food. While the other cosmonauts simply poured the food from the cans into the saucepan, Titov realized that cleaning out the pan afterward consumed a large portion of his limited water supply. He thus opted to fill the saucepan with water and use it to boil his food directly in the can.

Meanwhile, Pavel Popvich, a proud Ukrainian, loudly sang songs of his homeland, while Yuri Gagarin pictured what his upcoming spaceflight would look like:

“I thought about the future, not the past, as one usually does in such circumstances. I imagined myself in the cabin of Vostok. I closed my eyes and saw the continents and oceans passing below the change of day and night, and far, far down, golden clusters of city lights. Although I was never abroad I pictured myself flying over Peking and London Rome and Paris, and over my native Gzhatsk…all this helped me sustain the strain of utter isolation.”

Boris Volynov, who was forced to spend his 26^th birthday in the chamber, later recalled the unnerving effects of total isolation:

“At first it was strange to be without people. Then I got used to it. I started to do a lot of work. You know, it is a good thing that the day in the chamber is so completely filled that there is no time to be lonely. There is always something to do. The doctors are wonderful in that respect. I checked on the thermometers, the hygrometers, I kept checking on the instruments, and preparedly own food…but the day comes when you finally want to talk to someone. I had such a day…my birthday. Imagine – I have spent my 25 birthday on earth and my 26th had to be spent in the ‘cosmos’. Have you any idea what it means to sit alone, enclosed in four walls for so many days? And take into consideration that I am a pilot…the whole sky was mine. And suddenly, instead of the sky, a small narrow chamber.

On my birthday I wanted very much for someone to be with me…to hear some good kind words…a live human voice. A man word, only a single word, what would I not have given for a single word.

When I came out, something improbable happened to me. Everyone gathered around me, motion-picture cameras began humming, and the girls were shouting ‘Well, tell us something; tell us.’ And I can do nothing but stand there and remain silent. I am so happy that I look at the people with blank eyes and can’t say a word; almost as if I had forgotten how to speak. I had longed so much for human speech that I am waiting until someone would say something, anything. I am sick of my own voice.”

Valentin Bondarenko was the second-last cosmonaut to undergo this ordeal when he stepped into the chamber on March 13, 1961. Ten days later on March 23, a green light in the chamber flicked on, indicating that his assigned tasks for that day were complete. Bondarenko duly began removing the biosensors from his body, using a cotton ball soaked in alcohol to clean off the conductive paste residue. Then, suddenly, all hell broke loose. In a moment of carelessness, Bondarenko tossed the used cotton ball over his shoulder. It fell into the glowing coils of an electric space heater and burst into flames. At the time, the chamber was pressurized to a simulated altitude of 5 kilometres and contained an atmosphere with 68% oxygen. In this enriched environment the fire quickly raged out of control, jumping to Bondarenko’s wool flight suit. He desperately tried to beat out the flames, but this just succeeded in spreading them, and soon Bondarenko’s body was engulfed in fire.

Outside the chamber, duty doctor Mikhail Novikov and a technical support team rushed to the hatch, but it could only be opened once the pressure inside and outside the chamber had equalized. After many agonizing minutes they finally wrenched the door open and dragged out Bondarenko’s charred body. Incredibly, Bondarenko was still alive, and as he was carried out of the chamber he reassured his comrades:

“It’s my fault…I’m so sorry…no one is to blame!”

Bondarenko was whisked to the Botkin Hospital in northeast Moscow, where Dr. Vladimir Golyakhovsky was on duty. He later recalled receiving a frantic phone call from a Colonel Ivanov from the Central Aviation Institute of Medicine and, minutes later, seeing a convoy of official-looking black Volga cars and a military ambulance pull up to the hospital. The patient they brought in was a horrifying sight:

“The body was totally denuded of skin, the head of hair; there were no eyes in the face – everything had been burnt away. It was a total burn of the severest degree.”

Indeed, so thoroughly burned as Bondarenko’s body that the only place that could be found to start an IV were the soles of his feet, which had been protected from the flames by thick-soled shoes. Bondarenko was given morphine, which seemed to help with his pain, but there was little else Dr. Golyakhovsky and his staff could do. Within hours, Bondarenko succumbed to his burns.

Curiously, Dr. Golyakhovsky later claimed to have encountered a fellow cosmonaut at Bondarenko’s bedside:

“He was very small in stature and his wrist was as thin as a child’s. But he gave me a strong man’s handshake. His face stuck in my memory and [just three weeks later] I saw his photograph in the newspapers: his name was Yuri Gagarin; he was the first man in space.”

However, this is likely a case of faulty memory, for at the time Yuri Gagarin was at the Baikonur cosmodrome supervising the launch of Korabl-Sputnik 5, and was unlikely to have flown all the way back to Moscow to be at Bondarenko’s bedside.

Though Bondarenko was buried as an Air Force pilot, with no recognition of his status as a cosmonaut, his family were nonetheless provided with all the necessities concordant with that status. He was also posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Star in June 1961. However, all news of his horrific death was suppressed, and all those who witnessed the incident were sworn to secrecy.

It has often been argued that if the Soviet space program had not been so secretive and shared the details of Bondarenko’s death with the Americans, then the Apollo 1 disaster of January 27, 1967 – in which astronauts Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee perished in a similar oxygen-fuelled fire – might have been avoided. However, this is unlikely, for NASA was well aware of the dangers of fires in pure oxygen environments. Indeed, prior to Apollo 1 there were seven recorded cases of severe oxygen fires in the United States alone, including a decompression chamber accident in 1965 that killed two U.S. Navy divers. Despite this, for the sake of simplicity and expedience NASA continued to use pure-oxygen atmospheres aboard its spacecraft – with tragic consequences. And for more on a forgotten near-disaster that predated the Apollo 1 fire, please check out our previous video That Time NASA Almost Turned Two Astronauts into Roman Candles.

As the space race wore on, it became harder and harder for the Soviets to hide their failures. The next major tragedy to befall the Soviet space program occurred in 1967 during the maiden flight of the new Soyuz spacecraft. The development of the spacecraft was notoriously rushed, with engineers reporting 203 major flaws in the design. Nonetheless, the Politburo pressured the planners into launching the spacecraft on schedule so it would coincide with the anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birth. And so, Soyuz 1 was launched on April 23, 1967 with cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov aboard. As expected, the mission was a disaster, with the spacecraft suffering dozens of technical faults including a severe power shortage caused by one solar panel failing to deploy. And when the spacecraft finally reentered the earth’s atmosphere, the parachutes failed to deploy and the capsule slammed into the ground at 140 kilometres per hour, killing Komarov instantly – and for more on this ill-fated mission, please check out our previous video The Most Disastrous Space Mission Ever Mounted.

Though news of the Soyuz 1 disaster soon leaked to the world press, the influence of the lost cosmonaut rumours were clearly felt in the way the incident was reported on. Several sources reported that radio amateurs had intercepted transmissions from Komarov as he reentered the atmosphere, making tearful goodbyes to his wife and angrily cursing the engineers who built his faulty spacecraft as well as Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin. However, these claims are almost certainly false, as Komarov’s last recorded words – transmitted just prior to reentry – were simply “Thank you, tell everyone it happened.” The ionization blackout – the blocking of radio signals by hot, ionized gas collecting around the spacecraft – would have prevented any subsequent transmissions from reaching the ground. Similar rumours emerged following the Soyuz 11 disaster of June 29, 1971, in which a stuck ventilation valve caused the capsule to depressurize during reentry, suffocating cosmonauts Georgy Dobrolovsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev.

Even the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not bring an end to the lost cosmonaut conspiracies. In the early 2000s, a story emerged that in 1969, the Soviets hastily attempted to launch a Soyuz 7K-L3 capsule on a circumlunar flight ahead of the American Apollo 11 mission. Unfortunately, the capsule shot past the moon, sending the crew – which allegedly included a cosmonaut named Andrei Mikoyan – drifting off into deep space. In addition to there being no official record of such a launch, a mission of this type would have been all but impossible. At the time, the only Soviet rocket capable of achieving a translunar trajectory was the N-1 – the Soviet equivalent of the American Saturn V moon rocket. The N-1 was tested four times on February 21 and July 3, 1969; June 26, 1971; and November 23, 1972, with each launch ending in failure. The second failure was particularly dramatic, resulting in one of the largest manmade non-nuclear explosions in history with an equivalent yield of 1,000 tons of TNT. As these launches were closely monitored by American spy satellites, it is unlikely one could have been conducted in secret. Indeed, the story of Andrei Mikoyan’s ill-fated spaceflight was most certainly based on an October 28, 1996 episode of the American television series The Cape, which featured an almost identical plot and character name.

In 1997, another story emerged regarding the flight of Soyuz 3 on October 26, 1968. Officially, the Soyuz 3 spacecraft, flown by cosmonaut Goergy Beregovoy, rendezvoused in orbit with the unmanned Soyuz 2. According to the story, however, Soyuz 2 was actually manned by cosmonaut Ivan Istochnikov, who abruptly stopped transmitting during the mission – the victim of a meteorite strike. His name and involvement in the mission were subsequently expunged from Soviet records, and Soyuz 2 officially stated to be unmanned.

Though this story was picked up by several world news outlets, it was soon revealed to be a hoax perpetrated by Spanish conceptual artist Joan Fontcuberta, whose work often focuses on the manipulability of historical records. Fontcuberta’s exhibit, titled Sputnik, was exhibited in art museums around the world and comprised dozens of fabricated mission artefacts, digitally manipulated images, and detailed biographies of Istochnikov and other historic documents. In retrospect, had the sources who repeated the story examined the evidence a bit more closely, they would have noticed dozens of clues as to the story’s true nature. For example, the name “Ivan Istochnikov” translates to “John Hidden Fountain” – as does the name of artist Joan Fontcuberta. Alleged photographs of Istochnikov were created from images of Fontcuberta’s face, while the biographies and other documents featured in the exhibit contain hundreds of historical and technical errors. Even more blatantly, the exhibit programs and websites feature multiple, barely-concealed instances of the words PURE FICTION.

That the story of Ivan Istochnikov was so readily believed speaks to the seductive power of the lost cosmonaut myth, which has inspired hundreds of works of fiction over the last six decades. The extreme secrecy and paranoia that characterized the Soviet Union – not to mention its infamous disregard for human life – furnished an ideal breeding ground for conspiracies about brave cosmonauts who sacrificed themselves for the glory of the Soviet state only to be unceremoniously airbrushed from history for their failures. But while the Soviet Union was guilty of many crimes and cover-ups, the overwhelming body of evidence points to the phantom or lost cosmonauts being little more than an elaborate fiction. The truth is no manned space launches were attempted prior to April 12, 1961. Yuri Gagarin was – and remains – the first man to travel into space.

Expand for References