At the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Khruschev denounced Stalin, thus beginning an era of greater openness and tolerance within the Soviet Union and of ‘détente’ with the West. Burchett moved to Moscow in the spring of 1957 as Moscow correspondent for the left-wing New York weekly The National Guardian and was soon recruited by the Daily Express – and later the Sunday Express and the Financial Times.

Burchett was more interested in the conquests of space and virgin lands in the furthest corners of the Soviet Union than in ‘Kremlinology’, and he produced three books on these ‘pioneering’ topics.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space, written with Anthony Purdy, was described by the publishers as ‘the first Western evaluation of man's greatest exploit and of Russia's amazing achievements in the exploration of space’, and it became an immediate bestseller, except in the US where it was banned as ‘Soviet propaganda’.

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At midday on 14 April 1961, an Ilyushin-18 plane, escorted by seven MiG fighters, swept over Vnukovo Airport and on to circle low over Moscow. The Man from Space was about to arrive. Half an hour earlier a similar plane had brought Khruschev from an interrupted Black Sea holiday at Sochi. The airport was decorated with flags and bunting and slogans hailing Yuri Gagarin, Conqueror of the Cosmos.