Soviet suicide-astronauts on the moon

Inside the Soviet descent vehicle Lunokhod-1 there was a dwarf
who controlled this vehicle and shot himself when it became
clear that it would not be possible to return it to Earth. This
statement was made by the state security officer Vadim Petrov
in the spring of 1990. He argued that back in the late 1950s,
the leadership of the KGB created a secret detachment of test
cosmonauts who were launched into space inside special pilot
modules to support interplanetary missions. When Lunokhod-1
went there in 1970, two test cosmonauts flew with it. After
landing on the moon, the damage to the landing gear was fixed,
the tuning of the solar panels was adjusted, the aiming of the
television cameras was provided and they died due to a lack of
oxygen. This topic was provoked by a television program, which
first told about the drivers of the "Lunokhod".
During the launch of other lunar spacecraft of the "Zond" series,
a large amount of information emerged. For example, the flight
of Zond-6, launched on November 10, 1968, was accompanied
by reports in the Western press that the pilot-cosmonaut Pavel
Popovich was on board. The sensational statement became
possible due to the fact that the "Zond-6" was used as a repeater
when checking the functionality of space communications.
On September 23, 1969, the launch of the E-8-5 series lunar
apparatus took place, which was supposed to deliver soil from
the Moon, but due to the failure of the upper stage, it remained
in low-earth orbit under the faceless designation "Kosmos-300".
It is speculated that this was another unsuccessful attempt to
send astronauts to the moon. The name of one of the cosmonauts
is Andrei Mikoyan. The version that Cosmos-300 was manned
turned out to be so popular that it was even used in the American
television series Cape, which tells about the operation of the
cosmodrome at Cape Canaveral. If you count the number of Soviet
cosmonauts who died by the end of 1969 in emergency launches
and unsuccessful flights, you get two dozen people. It was not for
nothing that in those years the legend about the existence of a
special cemetery at Baikonur, where only secret suicide bombers
were buried, went around the Soviet Union. The cemetery at the
cosmodrome really exists, as well as near any settlement. There are
the mass graves of test officers who died in missile disasters on
October 24, 1960.