I recently read the novel Omon Ra, which is a fictional story of a boy being sent to space on a suicide mission. In the novel the crew was held a secret and the soviets were trying to show they could put a unmanned spacecraft on the moon, but they didn't have the technology to do it yet, so instead of waiting, they sent these 6 boys on a one way ticket to space. Each person was killed off during each phase, until only the main character remained and he landed on the moon. Did the USSR have any missions like this? I did plenty of google searches and couldn't find anything but I have read that they were known to cover up pilot deaths anyway. I'm not sure if this is the sub-reddit that my question belongs in, but after reading this book I must know if they had any type of program such as this.
I think that the closest one is Soyuz 1. It was not a suicide mission per se but very risky and led to the death of the cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on 24th of april 1967.
After failing to launch three unmanned version (Kosmos missions 133, 140A and 140) of the new soviet spacecraft called Soyuz 7K-OK with the rocket of the same name, due to attittude control failures, they decided to launch soyuz 1 because of the space race pressure (USA was leading the race).
The mission had many failures :
One of the two solar power didn't deploy, thus disabling the craft power supply.
The automatic reaction control system (RCS) using small thrusters to control the orientation of the craft didn't work as expected and failed of few orbits later.
The automatic reentry didn't work, so Komarov had to make a risky manual maneuver using the moon as a landmark.
After the succesful opening of the high-altitude drag chute, the main parachute didn't open due to a pressure sensor malfunction ^note. Komarov then opened the second emergency chute, who tangled with the drag chute (normally ejected when the main chute opens).
Komarov died when his capsule hit the ground at 140 km/h.
note : There is an unofficial version saying that the tar heat-protecting the chute cover melted and glued it to the capsule.
No, there were no intentionally suicidal space missions, unless you count the 1957 flight of Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika on board. She died after a few hours in Orbit, probably due to a life support malfunction, but the vehicle had not been intended for a save return, so she was doomed in any case.
This particular story was not invented out of whole cloth by Victor Pelevin, though. It was based on an urban legend going around Moscow around 1970 as a reaction to the Lunokhod lunar rover missions — apparently some people could not believe that Soviet technology was quite up to the task of building a remotely controlled robotic vehicle. It was a ridiculous conjecture, of course: For one thing the rover was active on the moon for the better part of a year. It obviously could not have contained the provisions for a pilot.
No.
Early on the soviet space-program took considerable risks which among other things resulted in the deaths on Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11. There were other rather close calls but every soviet mission was on paper at least survivable (Soyuz 1 in practice wasn't and if Soyuz 2 had gone ahead as planned it would also have resulted in the deaths of the cosmonauts involved but this wasn't known at the time).
Suicide missions are popular with writers and conspiracy theorists but for what the soviets were doing they don't make much sense. The extra mass to return from low earth orbit isn't that great and most of the PR is going to come from bringing astronauts back alive. For more remote missions automated systems mass so much less than humans that you are going to want to use automated systems.
For example the soviets were just about able to put a man in a there and back orbit around the moon (Zond 7 could have done it) but extra crew to die to make course corrections would have put them over their mass budget. For a moon lander like Luna 24 the lander alone eats up most of the mass budget so a human+life support system isn't a viable addition.
Its also hard to keep things secret in space. The US's exact abilities to observe foreign space objects are classified but you can calculate what is possible from the ground (you can get the shape of what is launched) and statements following the Columbia disaster indicate that the US has satellites that can manoeuvre enough to closely observe other objects at least within LEO.
A fair bit of effort was put into tracking soviet missions and with the end of the cold war we got more information on their failures. For example Kosmos 359 was a failed venus probe (still in earth orbit in fact).