byronic :: mad bad and dangerous to know

Front row: A.G. Nikolayev; Y.A. Gagarin; “Vostok” chief designer S.P. Korolioff; training director Karpov; parachute trainer N.K. Nikitin.
Back row: P.R. Popovich; G.G. Nelyuboff; G.S. Titov; V.F. Bykovsky.

It is a well known fact that, at the beginning of the space race, the Soviet authorities refused to admit failure in their manned missions. They made great efforts to hide any trace of those pilots or cosmonauts that either perished or were, in some other way, disgraced.

The first series of pictures presented here are known as the “Sochi” photographs, because they were taken at the Black Sea resort of Sochi in May of 1961, shortly after the successful orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin.

The picture with the six cosmonauts has been released in at least four versions, three of which were notable for the absence of one of the cosmonauts, airbrushed into oblivion by the state censors. The missing cosmonaut has been identified as Grigory Grigoryevich Nelyuboff. The current story from Moscow is that Nelyuboff was expelled from the cosmonauts’ corps for bad behavior (apparently he got into a fight). He fell into disgrace and committed suicide in 1966.

via The Lost Cosmonauts - Erased from memory