It was a three-barreled gun that fired shotgun shells, rifle rounds, and rescue flares. 10 rounds of each type of ammunition were supplied. The stock could be detached and used as a machete.

For a while, these guns were on every Soyuz capsule that docked with ISS, and they were under the operational control of the Soyuz commander. I've read that they may have been retired in 2007 because Russia finally ran out of the very unique ammo.

Did the cosmonauts fend off the wolves, or did they just stick the wolves in their suits and pretend that they were on the mission the whole time?

It's such a weird flip of philosophy given we've all heard the classic story of the US spending millions on developing pens that write in space while the Soviet Union just issued pencils.

Choosing a retroburst system over trusty parachutes over water is wack, but as someone else pointed out it's more to do with their Navy than anything else. Plus knowing Russia's current capabilities, they'd probably forget to factor in the water being frozen or something stupid like that.

Moon bears?

Low key, we gotta pack some shotties in ours. Space race to the death!

When they were covering the Artemis landing, they mentioned that just returning to earth from weightlessness makes them pretty nauseous, so they get motion sickness meds before landing anyway. Ibuprofen or anti inflammatory meds too, since 1 G is hard on joints after a few days without it.

Water isn't like in the video games. It's still a hard landing that you wouldn't survive if you were going too fast. There's just much more margin for error trying to hit the ocean vs. a plot of land.

They had only imagined the moon flight...

On July 21, 1961, Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom flew the second NASA Mercury-Redstone mission. But that trip, nearly identical to Shepard’s almost ended in disaster. Grissom’s capsule, Liberty Bell 7, sank after the successful splashdown in the Atlantic, and Grissom came close to drowning.

The space race has a lot of "learning by doing" with some pretty icky lessons learned along the way.

Ref

One of the advantages of water is even if your target area is measured in square miles it's all roughly at sea level. If you miss your target area on land you have to account for that and trees and wildlife and hopefully not buildings.

Like the above said, you can do either, it's kind of a wash. But a water based landing does simplify some things.