[citation needed] A hero could be awarded the title again for a subsequent heroic feat with an additional Gold Star medal and certificate.

The Soviet-style "Hero" title is still used both in surviving current Communist states such as Cuba and in some non-Communist post-Soviet countries such as Russia, Ukraine, and others.

[9] The first recipients of the award were the pilots Anatoly Liapidevsky (certificate number one), Sigizmund Levanevsky, Vasily Molokov, Mavriky Slepnyov, Nikolai Kamanin, Ivan Doronin, and Mikhail Vodopianov, who participated in the successful aerial search and rescue of the crew of the steamship Cheliuskin, which sank in Arctic waters, crushed by ice fields, on 13 February 1934.

Valentina Grizodubova, a female pilot, was the first woman to become a Hero of the Soviet Union (2 November 1938)[10] for her international women's record for a straight-line distance flight.

[13] Fighter pilots Aleksandr Pokryshkin and Ivan Kozhedub were three times Heroes of the Soviet Union.

[15][16] After his release from serving a 20-year sentence in a Mexican prison for the assassination of Leon Trotsky, Ramón Mercader moved to the Soviet Union in 1961 and as Ramon Lopez[17] was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Hero of the Soviet Union medal "for the special deed" by KGB head Alexander Shelepin.

[citation needed] The only individuals to receive the title four times were Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Leonid Brezhnev.

The original statute of the Hero of the Soviet Union, however, did not provide for a fourth title; its provisions allowed for a maximum of three awards regardless of later deeds.

There is some speculation that Zhukov's fourth Hero medal was for his participation in the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria in 1953, but this was not entered in the records.