If you like these kinds of stories, Boris Chertok's memoirs have a lot more from the Russian early launches during the space race. He was in charge of electrical systems in many of the Russian rockets.
NASA history has an excellent four volume translation of his memoirs. In volume 2 he describes the development and testing of the R7 (Soyuz) rocket:
That makes me remember some interesting things I read that explains how much of the space race went:
In the immediate post-WWII era, the US had lots of experience with long-range heavy bombers, and plenty of air bases close-ish to the USSR. So the US focused on delivering nukes via aircraft and neglected rockets at first. The Soviets weren't real into long-range heavy bombers, and didn't have many air bases near the US anyways, so they went in on long-range rockets sooner and harder. Their nuclear program was less developed too, so their bombs were bigger and heavier. This means that their long-range bomb delivery rockets were big and powerful enough to double as orbital rockets with minimal changes. US bomb delivery rockets were significantly smaller, so we needed to develop all-new rockets to start launching things into orbit.
The Soviets were also behind on electronics and automation. When they wanted to do orbital surveillance and intelligence gathering, they put actual humans in their satellites to do it. The Americans decided that it was better to use electronics to do the same job. It was indeed better to use electronics for the purpose of surveilence, but that also meant that the Soviets racked up a lot of experience in running manned space stations that we didn't start to touch until much later on.
NASA history has an excellent four volume translation of his memoirs. In volume 2 he describes the development and testing of the R7 (Soyuz) rocket:
https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol2_deta...