Dead Cosmonauts

speculation was rife in the western press concerning soviet fatalities in space.

October 1959 edition of Ogonyok carried an article 'Flights to High Altitudes' (O)

!n 1959 and 1962, Italian news bureau Continentale quoted " high ranking officials" in Prague (C)

Readers Digest in 1965 featured radio intercepts of the Judica-Cordiglia brothers (JC)

Alexei Ledovsky	november 1957	failed suborbital,reached height of 200 miles	a series of cosmonaut deaths on suborbital flights (C)
Serenti Shiborin	february 1 1958	failed suborbital	(C) Hermann Oberth claimed in 1959 that a pilot had been killed on a sub-orbital ballistic flight from Kapustin Yar in early 1958.
Andrei Mitkov	january 1959	failed suborbital	(C) In 2001 Pravda announced that three spacecraft with pilots were launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome in 1957, 1958 and 1959. "All three pilots died during the flights, and their names were never officially published," Rudenko said.
Mirya Gromova	1959	Burya spaceplane crash	said to have flown some sort of 'space airplane' into oblivion. (C)
Vasilli Zavadovski	may 15 1960	vostok failed to reenter	Colonel Barney Oldfield , US Air Force Command, revealed that a space cabin, which failed to separate from the booster rocket, had orbited earth since May 1960 and was possibly manned.
Ivan Kachur	september 27 1960	vostok liftoff failure	extensive rumours of a pending Soviet space flight of importance in September-October 1960. (O)
Pyotr Dolgov or Piotr Ivanovich	october 11 1960	vostok orbital failure	the flight was 'tracked for 20 minutes by stations in Turkey, Japan, Sweden, England and Italy'. (FE)
Alexis Graciov	november 28 1960	vostok translunar failure	cryptic Morse code English message 'SOS to the entire world' from a stationary point in the sky. They concluded this was from a cosmonaut who had inadvertently rocketed into a translunar trajectory (JC)
Gennady Michaelov (+1?)	february 2-4 1961 or february 17-24 61	vostok circumlunar failure	the racing heart beat recorded in 2-4 February 1962. (JC) on February 17, 1961, two cosmonauts aboard a "Lunik" spacecraft were launched from Baikonur. Their original mission, according to rumor, was a circumlunar flight. However, the spacecraft remained in earth orbit, unable to return normally. The two cosmonauts included a man and woman who frequently radioed back, "Everything satisfactory. We are maintaining the prescribed altitude." (FE)
Vladimir Ilyushin	april 7 1961	vostok crash landing in china after 3 orbits, pilot survives	On the day prior to Yuri Gagarin's first flight, a newspaper account written by British Communist journalist Dennis Ogden stated that the Soviet Union had launched a man into space and that he had been injured. The next day French journalist Eduard Brobovsky named the man as Ilyushin.
Ludmilla Serakovna (+1?)	may 16-23 1961	vostok reentry failure	the 'heart-rending' voice can be heard reporting increasing temperatures as the capsule burns up in the atmosphere.(JC)
Ivan Grachov (+1female?)	october 14 1961	vostok circumlunar failure	The two spacemen were said to have been launched aboard "Vostok III", and it was the intention that the space vehicle should have carried out one round trip around the moon and one around the earth, such that at the end of the experiment it would have traversed an orbit resembling the digit 8. However, the space vehicle disappeared in the heavens (O) (C)
Alexis Belokonyev (+1?)	may 15 1962	vostok orbital failure	two men and a woman in desperate conversation: 'Conditions growing worse ; why don't you answer? ... we are going slower... the world will never know about us . . ' (JC) (O)

For the record, here is a summary of the remaining flights on the Launchspace rumor list:

Oct.11, 1960: Col. Piotr Ivanovitch, a cosmonaut, is monitored for 30-minutes.
Nov. 28, 1960: An unknown cosmonaut was heard sending frantic voice SOS signals.
Feb. 2, 1961: An unknown cosmonaut's breathing and heart signals were monitored for almost 30-minutes.
Apr. 7, 1961: Signals from cosmonaut Vassilievitch Dowodovsky stopped shortly after liftoff. Five days later, on Apr 12, cosmonaut Maj. Yuri Gargarin orbited Earth and was officially acknowledged as the first human in space.
May. 17, 1961: Two persons in a capsule, one possibly female, monitored for 2-minutes.
Oct .14, 1961: Two persons, one a female, were monitored for 7-hours, apparently on the way to the Moon.

And here are summarized the balance of the rumor entries Oberg lists in his book:

May 1960: An unknown cosmonaut is stranded in space.
Sept. 1960: A cosmonaut, possibly named Pyotr Dolgov, is blown up on the launchpad.
Feb. 4, 1961: Heartbeats were monitored for a time from a Soviet satellite. (Similar to the Feb. 2, 1961 Launchspace entry.)
April 1961: Vladimir Ilyushin circled the earth three times but was badly injured on his return.
Mid-May 1961: Two cosmonauts heard issuing faint calls for help.
Oct. 14, 1961: A solar flare causes a multi-man Soviet spacecraft to go off course and never return. (Likely the same rumor as the Launchspace list for the same date.)
Nov. 1962: Signals from a doomed mission detected. The victim may be a cosmonaut named Belokonev.
Nov. 19, 1963: Attempts to launch the second woman into space fails.
April 1964: One or more cosmonauts die on a mission.
1967: After three Americans die in the Apollo 1 fire, U.S. intelligence sources report five failed Soviet flights and six fatal ground incidents.

http://www.pietro.org/Astro_Home/NewsNotes/NN061501.htm

Then, in 1986, Golovanov revealed in Irvestiya that indeed there had been a cosmonaut fatality back then after all, and it had been kept secret. His article even included the dead cosmonaut's name, Valentin Bondarenko, and the date of his death, March 23, 1961.He was burned to death in an oxygen chamber accident.

By 1973 I had compiled an imposing list of rumors about missing cosmonauts:
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 . What is an observer to conclude from this barrage of stories! "Where's there's smoke, there's fire" is a trite proverb, but all the same, the consensus seemed to be that not all the stories could be spurious; some, perhaps two or three, must have been based on actual events.

The May 17, 1961 event is described in particularly intriguing detail. With reports of signals from space and several Russian spacemen reporting to earth (from the "moon", using the call sign "cave", or "hole", for the earth control center), Mr. Edwards decided to describe the event in just the way he had predicted it more than a year earlier. A man and a woman reported "Everything satisfactory, we are maintaining the prescribed altitude". On May 24th, however, the voices reported that trouble had developed, and with ever increasing excitement described the sequence of events. Finally, the man sighed, "If we do not get out the world will never learn about it". Presumably he meant that the flight would remain a secret. In Flying Saucers, Serious Business, Edwards decided that he really meant that the world would never learn about the flying saucer that was intercepting them. Edwards also decided that the flight had occurred in February, not May.

From European sources, Mr. Edwards comes up with some new material. The September 1960 event (Mr. Edwards says October 11th) is assigned to the Russian test pilot Pyotr Dolgov. He is supposed to have "been tracked for 20 minutes by stations in Turkey, Japan, Sweden, England and Italy".

The Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera published a summary of such events shortly after Leonov's spacewalk in March 1965. Besides the events already described, new shots were detailed: a November 1962 flight when Belokonev was killed; a female cosmonaut, lost on 10 November 1963; another flight, with tragic results, in April 1964. The source of these stories was the Torre Bert radiomen, the brothers Judica-Cordiglia.

http://www.jamesoberg.com/

female cosmonaut	november 19 1963	vostok launch failure
multi man crew	april 1964	no details