On the other hand, they had a system on their unmanned spacecraft that blew them up with TNT if there was a chance of them coming down outside the USSR. It was

On the other hand, they had a system on their unmanned spacecraft that blew them up with TNT if there was a chance of them coming down outside the USSR. It was regularly triggered during their heyday in the 60's. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth from the engineers when that prevented them from collecting data on failed missions. I read about it in Boris Chertok's memoirs (http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/feb/HQ_12-054_Chertok_Rockets_and_People.html http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/feb/HQ_12-054_Chertok_R...), which are huge and sprawling, he was there from the beginning, from the mission to get V2 stuff from Germany after WW2, through the Soviet Union's fall.