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ACCORDING TO SPANish artist Joan Fontcuberta, the Soviets didn't want anyone finding out about Col. Ivan Istochnikov, the cosmonaut who manned the ill-fated flight of the Soyuz 2 spacecraft on October 25, 1968. In fact, they went to great lengths to cover up the mission's enigmatic disaster-how Istochnikov and his canine companion Kloka mysteriously vanished after leaving the capsule for a routine space walk. When the Soyuz 3 arrived for a docking maneuver, it found only a vodka bottle containing a note, floating in orbit outside the empty, meteorite-damaged ship.
The previous journey of the Soyuz 1 had already ended in a widely publicized tragedy-cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed when the capsule's reentry parachutes failed-and Soviet officials would not tolerate another failure. They wanted nothing more on the record that could tarnish the reputation of their larger-than-life space program, a matter of enormous national pride and international competition.
So Istochnikov, once regarded as a popular hero like all his fellow cosmonauts, was stealthily erased from official Soviet history. "For the official record, Ivan Istochnikov died from an illness a few months earlier," wrote Michael Arena, historian of the Sputnik Foundation of Moscow, in his text "On the Trail of Ivan Istochnikov."
"To avoid contradictory voices, his family were confined, his colleagues were blackmailed, the archives were doctored, and photographs retouched," Arena wrote.
The Soyuz 2 flight went down in history as unmanned-as if Istochnikov had...