Henry Spencer wrote:
Not at the time, no, but much more detail has come out since. All the old
Cold War rumors of unreported deaths in space are now definitely known to
be false, the result of misunderstandings and malicious rumor-mongering.


I still think there's something odd about the Ilyushin story:
http://www.astronautix.com/astros/ilyushin.htm
By the time he's recovering down in Hangchow, China from his automobile
accident the Soviet Union and China are starting to be on on the outs.
So it's odd a top test pilot would end up down there. It's also odd that
the Soviets would seem to think that China could somehow do something
medically for him that they couldn't, because that's very much against
their traditional "We're best at everything" pride.
I don't think he was on some pre-Gagarin space mission, but I wouldn't
be surprised to find out he paid an unexpected visit to China in the
same way that Francis Gary Powers paid an unexpected visit to the USSR,
and the false report of his launch and injury was some garbled version
of real events based on rumors about this incident.
Note that one of the things he had done was establish a world altitude
record in 1959, and would later establish a sustained world altitude
record also. So he had a lot of experience in high altitude flight, and
if you were going do some photo reconnaissance of China you'd do it from
high altitude to avoid detection.

Pat