Amur and Baikal

Let's take a look at the Soyuz 4 & 5 mission that took place in January '69, a few months before Apollo 9:

Had this daring and intensely risky mission been attempted, as intended, two years earlier, it would have cleared a major hurdle in the Soviet assault on the Moon, but by the end of 1968 America staged a circumlunar mission and the joint flight of Soyuz 4/5 looked to the rest of the world like a stunt and a mere shadow of what it might have been.

In fact, Shatalov and the Soyuz 5 crew of Boris Volynov, Alexei Yeliseyev, and Yevgeni Khrunov had barely concluded their final exams when, on Christmas Eve, they received the grim news that Apollo 8 had entered orbit around the Moon. Working until late that night, for Shatalov the pot boiled over when the cosmonauts’ commander, General Nikolai Kamanin, told them that a “recommendation” had been received from Soviet senior leadership for Soyuz 4/5 to dock automatically and not manually. The four cosmonauts objected, arguing that they had the piloting skills necessary and ought to be permitted to execute a manual docking. At length, Shatalov exploded: “Here we are, debating this for the tenth time,” he is said to have raged, “whilst the Americans are orbiting the Moon!”

The question of whether to give cosmonauts active control of their ships had been hotly disputed since the early days of the Soviet space program. Kamanin frequently locked horns with Chief Designer Sergei Korolev over the issue, and his memoirs—preserved in a series of diary entries, first published in 1995—revealed a tough, bitter military man who blamed his country’s loss of the Moon race on Soviet engineers’ unwillingness to yield control of a spacecraft to its crew.

After various troubles, both spacecraft got upstairs, then a couple cosmonauts went outside for a quick stroll on this date:

The EVA objectives for the docking mission were similar to those planned for Apollo 9. Soyuz 4 launched first with commander Vladimir Shatalov as the pilot and was the active vehicle in the docking with Soyuz 5. Considering there was a mutual coupling of the ships and their electrical circuits were connected during the flight, this was the world's first experimental cosmic station. During the mission, they rehearsed elements of the Soviet piloted lunar mission plan.

Commander Boris Volynov was the pilot of Soyuz 5, which carried Aleksei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov, both flight engineers, as the crew to be transferred to Soyuz 4 for re-entry. The mission plan contained technical, scientific, and medical-biological research. The mission also tested spacecraft systems and design elements, the transfer of cosmonauts from one craft to another in orbit, and the docking of a piloted spacecraft...  

The two cosmonauts exited the Soyuz 5 spacecraft on their 35th revolution of Earth for the second Soviet spacewalk in history. Khrunov went out first, transferring to Soyuz 4 while the two docked spacecrafts were over South America. Yeliseyev transferred while the spacecrafts were over the Soviet Union. During the EVA, one of Khrunov's lines became tangled, and he closed the tumbler of his suit ventilator accidentally. 

Yeliseyev did not set up the movie camera before exiting the spacecraft, meaning there is no film of this historic EVA. The only footage that exists is a poor video transmission. One hour after leaving Soyuz 5, the two were greeted by Shatalov after the Soyuz 4 orbital module's re-pressurization. The spacewalkers took newspapers, letters, and telegrams printed after Shatalov lifted off in Soyuz 4 to help prove that the transfer took place.

Coming home was an adventure:

The retro-fire for Soyuz-4  occured at 0611 UT on Friday 17 January 1969. Soyuz-4 landed at 0650.47 UT at a spot about 40 km NW of Karaganda, where the temperature was -35C. Sports commissar Ivan Borisenko received the cosmonauts and peasants from the "Bersznyaki" collective farm rushed to the scene.

The end of the Soyuz-5 flight was not so routine. The original plan was to land at about 0630 UT and for Volynov to orient the ship manually for retro-fire. He even rehearsed this on the pre-landing orbit and reported that he had completed the task in the 9 minutes available. Despite this Volynov was directed to try the manual orientation. The spacecraft left eclipse at 0539 UT and the planned retro-fire was at 0548.49 UT. 

At about 0556 UT Volynov reported (to the ship off Africa?) that he had not had enough time to complete the maneuver. However, stored commands to carry out an automatic orientation on the next orbit had already been uplinked. The automatic sequence for orientation and retro-fire worked as planned.

After the end of retro-fire the instrument module did not separate despite the fact the explosive bolts fired. Boris Volynov could see the antennas on the solar panels and realized that the instrument module was still attached. He reported this through some coded radio channel to mission control...

This was a life-threatening situation. Eventually, propellant tanks in the instrument module exploded due to the re-entry heat and the two modules separated. The re-entry vehicle which had taken the reentry aerodynamic and heat loads in the area of its top hatch swung around to the normal re-entry attitude and made a purely ballistic reentry. Upon landing the parachute had problems to deploy properly, but the craft landed, and the landing shock was such that Volynov was thrown across the cabin and broke some of his front teeth.

They weren't even safe back on Earth, as Alexei Leonov reported.  Makes me happy to have my boring little life...