Cosmonaut Ledovsky was killed in 1957 on a suborbital space hop from the Kapustin Yar rocket base on the Volga River.
Cosmonaut Shiborin died the following year the same way.
Cosmonaut Mitkov lost his life on a third attempt in 1959.
An unnamed cosmonaut was trapped in space in May 1960, when his orbiting space capsule headed in the wrong direction.
In late September 1960, while Khrushchev pounded his shoe at the United Nations, another cosmonaut (sometimes identified as Pyotr Dolgov) was killed when his rocket blew up on the launchpad.
On February 4, 1961, a mystery Soviet satellite was heard to be transmitting heartbeats, which soon stopped (some reports even described it as a two-man capsule, and several "missing cosmonauts" were listed as Belokonev, Kachur, and Grachev).
Early in April 1961 Russian pilot Vladimir Ilyushin circled the earth three times but was badly injured on his return.
In mid-May 1961 weak calls for help were picked up in Europe, evidently from an orbiting spacecraft with two cosmonauts aboard.
On October 14, 1961, a multiman Soviet spacecraft was knocked off course by a solar flare and vanished into deep space .
Radio trackers in Italy detected a fatal space mission in November 1962, and some believe that a cosmonaut named Belokonev died at that time.
An attempt to launch a second woman into space ended tragically on November 19, 1963.
One or more cosmonauts were killed during an unsuccessful space mission in April 1964, according to radio intercepts by Italian shortwave listeners.
Following the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 which killed three American astronauts, U.S. intelligence sources reportedly described five fatal Soviet spaceflights and six fatal ground accidents.
1967, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov's domed flight where he predicted that he would die from a poorly prepared space vehicle. His last transmission was of him cursing the people that sent him into space only to experience a series of malfunctions, including the parachute that was to have safely landed him on earth, not deploying properly. Famed cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, had much to say about the Russian space program officials after the tragic death of his brave and dear friend....propaganda over lives.