This doesn't seem all that different than the Mercury program. There were two side to the race. Look closely at either and you will find safety being pushed.
It is also a little disingenuous to characterize the russian effort as "military" and the american effort as not. It wasn't Mr. John Glen first american in orbit. He remained an military officer while at Nasa and was awarded military honors for his flight (DFC). Smack whatever label you want, both programs had heavy military involvement.
Mercury is an incredible spacecraft. Incredibly small and light - less than 1400 kilogram, comparing to more than 4000 kilogram of Vostok. As an astronaut (Grissom?) put it, "you don't enter Mercury - you carefully put the spacecraft on you like gloves".
I sat in a mock-up once. Glove was not my impression. For me it was more 'spam in a can'. I would much prefer Vostok's ejection seat to landing a tiny mercury in a vast ocean.
Not to mention that until Apollo, all of our manned space flights flew on ballistic missile hardware. Redstone, Atlas and Titan were all designed to carry nuclear warheads.
I would include Apollo as having military connections too: a key member of the Saturn V design team was Wernher von Braun, so its design process will have taken much directly from his experience creating the V2 rockets in WWII. The whole space race was essentially a proxy for war: the two "sides" working as hard as they could to develop (and show off) technical dominance over each other.
I don't like double posting, but I read this again and ran accross this statement towards the end of the OP:
>But the frantic pace of the “space race” ensured that you had to sacrifice thorough ground testing in favor of debugging the technology in space. This means that you automatically increase the risk to human subjects on board spaceships.
By my memory, the US lost most astros to ground testing than to flight, the Apollo fire being top of the list. Training and testing are safer than flight, but are not absolutely safe. There is a balance point where the risks presented by ever more training outweigh any further reduction in risk during flight.
Prior to the Space Shuttle, all deaths related to our space programs happened as part of training: the Apollo 1 cabin fire during a pad test, and Gemini 9 crew's plane crash resulted in five total astronaut deaths.
A common idea was "any single system fault shouldn't make catastrophe by itself". Nowadays it's "any single fault shouldn't jeopardize the mission and any two faults should still allow for safe return of the crew". The redundancies are designed in accordance to this.
From this perspective Gagarin would die if both accelerating stage worked longer and retrorockets failed. Only one of this two systems malfunctioned - so, barely, he managed to return unscathed.
Just like a software project, it will just not be perfect on first release. If they had waited to fix the comms module, to test the strap on the survival pack, and so on, they'd still be working on it today and other country (probably US) would have beat them into space.
Overal their program probably killed about the same number of cosmonauts as US killed astronauts, or maybe even less.
You can play some games with numbers maybe if you want to include unmanned rockets exploding on launchpads or not -- China killed maybe around 500 people with an a satelite launch in the 90's. Russians killed 50 launchpad personnel during a failed Vostok lunch in the 60's.
TL;DR — "Gagarin was an incredibly lucky man to have come out of this unhurt and alive. In rushing to accomplish a human spaceflight in the race with the US, Soviet engineers pushed the boundary of acceptable risk to its limits. "
I remember reading Gagarin's biography few years ago. It mentioned that testing the limits of human endurance was a part of kosmonaut's training - and that was meant literally, i.e. any mistake or problem could and did result in serious injury or death.
Similarly for their US counterparts. The astronauts were stressed in training far beyond what they'd ever encounter in real space flight. It is a miracle that there weren't more injuries or fatalities in the space program.
But in the Mercury/Vostok era, astronauts were more test subjects than they were pilots. There was very little to gain except for publicity from sending humans to space. The scientific goals could have been accomplished with animal test subjects. The role of astronauts became more involved later in the Gemini/Apollo/Soyuz era with rendez-vous, docking and EVA operations.
I'm not sure about that. There have been plenty of mistakes made by astro/cosmonaughts over the years. They are human. If "any mistake" is lethal, then we should have seen many more deaths.
I wrote about cosmonaut's training, not a trained cosmonaut's job. Those who got hurt or died in training didn't get to fly rockets. Also, that was in the Gagarin's time; after getting enough data they probably relaxed the training a bit in the next decades.
It is also a little disingenuous to characterize the russian effort as "military" and the american effort as not. It wasn't Mr. John Glen first american in orbit. He remained an military officer while at Nasa and was awarded military honors for his flight (DFC). Smack whatever label you want, both programs had heavy military involvement.