The film "Taming of the Fire" revealed for the first time some details of the top secret Soviet missile program that was developing behind the Iron Curtain. At that time Soviet political censors had total domination over the filmmakers. Filming locations in the Soviet Union were top secret, such as the Baykonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and the Gagarin Space Center near Moscow. Soviet military censors watched the secret equipment and rocket science machinery that were disallowed, so several scenes with good acting were deleted and destroyed. The total length of destroyed footage was well over a thousand meters of film, so the released version of the film was reduced by one hour. Several scenes with performances by Petr Shelokhonov and other actors were also censored and destroyed.