Allegations Concerning Cosmonaut Losses, Gagarin's Role Refuted

This document, a 1991 JPRS report, compiles journalistic investigations into persistent rumors regarding the Soviet space program. The primary focus is the refutation of claims made by Hungarian writer I. Nemere, who alleged in his book 'Gagarin--kosmicheskiy lozh?' (Gagarin--a Space Lie?) that Yuri Gagarin was not the first human to orbit the Earth and that the Soviet government had covered up the deaths of other cosmonauts. The report features commentary from Czechoslovakian journalist Karel Patsner, who argues that these rumors are baseless and motivated by a desire for profit and anti-Soviet sentiment. Patsner details various Western rumors, including the alleged deaths of cosmonauts like Lodovskiy, Shiborin, and Mitkov, and the supposed flight of Vladimir Ilyushin, all of which he dismisses as false. The report also cites F. Klass's book 'Taynaya strazha v kosmose' (The Secret Watch in Space), which notes that American tracking stations and intelligence archives show no evidence of such concealed catastrophes. Finally, the document recounts an anecdote involving the Soviet chief designer S.P. Korolev, who, while vacationing in Czechoslovakia in 1964, dismissed the interest in UFOs and similar sensationalist topics as being of interest only to individual groups, emphasizing that the Soviet Union had to endure the consequences of its own secrecy.