On occasions Burchett managed to step outside the somewhat prosaic materialism of the new socialist states, and beyond the production statistics and population figures which often rendered this type of journalism rather turgid. This is the case in the following chapter of Come East Young Man, where he takes readers into a more philosophical realm by letting his good Moscow friend, the great Russian writer and humanist Ilya Ehrenburg, try to sort out the contradictions between the spiritual and material aspirations of homo sovieticus.

Ehrenburg was a prolific writer who was an important link between Soviet and Western intellectuals before and after the Cold War. A revolutionary and disenchanted poet in his youth, writing Catholic poems despite his Jewish background, he was also a friend of Bukharin and later Mayakovsky, and met and followed Lenin in Paris. Later he was hired to write Soviet propaganda, while occasionally defending his views with boldness against Stalin or government mouthpieces. He was a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and, together with Vasily Grossman, edited The Black Book, containing documentary accounts by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and Poland. He is probably best known for his fiction, particularly his novel The Thaw, which portrayed Russian society under the post-Stalin reforms of Khruschev.