When I was little, I was watching a History Channel documentary about the Soviet space program. They showed a series of clips of cosmonauts with melted looking faces. I cannot find any more information on these.
I had a teacher who was a conspiracy theorist who suggested that this was the one time that a spacecraft tried to penetrate the Van Allen Belts, thus resulting in the radiation disfiguring the cosmonauts. I don't necessarily believe that, but I do remember seeing pictures and videos of cosmonauts with severe injuries like I've described.
Back in April of 1967, during the flight of Soyuz 1, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov (the lone occupant of the spacecraft) was killed at the very end of a trouble-plagued mission when, during re-entry, his main and reserve parachutes on the Soyuz descent module failed to open correctly to arrest his descent to Earth.
This parachute deployment failure resulted in the fall rate of the spacecraft being well beyond a survivable level, impacting the ground at a speed of about 90 mph and killing Komarov instantly (the official cause of his death was multiple blunt-force injuries due to the initial impact). After the impact with the ground, the descent module caught fire, and basically incinerated Komarov's body. This is probably the image you remember seeing, showing military officials in the USSR examining his remains at the funeral.
