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On January 16th, 1969, the Soyuz-4 with Vladimir Shatalov on board has successfully docked to Soyuz-5 manned by Boris Volynov, Alexey Yeliseev and Evgeny Khrunov. The two space ships were launched from Baikonur with one day gap. This docking followed a failed attempt of Georgy Beregovoy to dock his Soyuz-3 to unmanned Soyuz-2 several months ago and was a step in the Lunar Space race between the USSR and the USA ensuring the capability of Soviets to rendez-vous and dock in space after a lunar ascent.
After the two ships docked, Yeliseev and Khrunov made a spacewalk in their Yastreb (meaning Hawk) spacesuits to traverse from Soyuz-5 to Soyuz-4 (the Soyuz ships of the time did not have an internal passage in their docking ports). They've delivered some symbolic items with them (letters and newspapers).
After undocking, Soyuz-4 landed first on January 17, carrying the three Cosmonauts. Their landing was smooth. Quite contrary, Volynov had problems landing the next day: his Soyuz's service module failed to detach from the reentry capsule and the stack reentered in the dangerous hatch-first attitude. The memory of Vladimir Komarov's death in the fatal Soyuz-1 mission during his landing has been very fresh then, so Boris, unable to use his radio, made a short written report on the cause of the ongoing abnormal situation and stowed the note in a possible fire secure place inside his seat, so it might be possibly recovered after his anticipated crash.
Fortunately, however, the backup separation mechanism worked the last moment, allowed the descent capsule to acquire the correct reentry attitude and deploy the parachute. The landing was hard due to additional failure of the soft landing engines, which resulted in Volynov's injures. This forced him to have a big recovering delay before he could go to space again.
In the quick pace of the Space Race which it was, the event was quickly dwarfed by the LEO and lunar Apollo missions.
Pic: the plaque memorizing Soyuz-4 and -5 joint flight:
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