Reddit reviews Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race

The majority of the myth comes from misinformation and Soviet-era paranoia. The facts:

1. The Soviet space program conducted two test flights with dogs and a realistic crash test dummy leading up to the launch of Vostok 1. This dummy, nicknamed "Ivan Ivanovich," was equipped with a radio that broadcasted recordings of a choir and a recipe for cabbage soup. He was retrieved from the capsule in the same way that Gagarin would later exit Vostok 1 - IE, ejection seat. It is possible that someone witnessed the landing and thought that the dummy (never alive) was in fact a dead cosmonaut. (Said dummy is presently on display at the Smithsonian.)
   
   
2. Around the same time, a cosmonaut trainee Valentin Bondarenko was killed in a ground-based training accident. News of the accident was kept from official outlets and evidence of Bondarenko ever being enrolled in the program was airbrushed out of official photographs. Between the test launches with the dummy and the vanished cadet, it's easy to understand how someone could have thought the Soviets managed to kill someone in flight. (Alexei Leonov discusses the incident in detail in his autobiography.)
   
   This only disproves one theory, but the others are pretty sketchy and I wouldn't bother giving them too much credence. At the very least, it's pretty conclusive that Gagarin was the first human being in space and the Soviets did not kill someone prior with a launch, although there was an unrelated training fatality.

I think you'll have better luck with books than film. This book provides a very thorough account of the early days of Soviet/Russian space stations. This one is written (in part) by Alexi Leonov, the Soviet's star cosmonaut, and he talks about training with Gagarin and the other early cosmonauts in the Vostok days, and about his Voskhod spacewalk.

Leonov is also an accomplished painter, and painted himself doing it.

and a different painting

For English speakers he wrong an account of his amazing spacewalk and other expereinces in a book he cowrote with American Astronaut David Scott.

If you can find a copy (and she doesn't have one), she might like Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race, written by Alexei Leonov (cosmonaut, first human to walk in space) and David Scott (Apollo 15 commander). They talk about their experiences in the astronaut/cosmonaut training, some about their earlier life, and, of course, their missions. Leonov also talks about working on some relatively lesser-know parts of the Soviet program, such as their moon landing effort (he was slated to be the first Soviet on the moon), and meeting with Sergei Korolyov.

Amazon link

Link for LAZY