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.
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.