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‘I felt fine. I saw the earth from a great altitude. I could see seas, mountains, big cities, rivers and forests.’

Now, for Khrushchev, the real fun. ‘We shall celebrate together with all the Soviet people. Let the world look on and see what our country is capable of, the things our great people and our Soviet science can do.’

Gagarin dutifully echoed the sentiment. ‘Now let the other countries try and overtake us.’

‘Exactly! Let the capitalist countries try to overtake us!’

According to his senior aide Fyodor Burlatsky, Khrushchev was deeply impressed by Gagarin’s cheerfulness and the enthusiastic nature of all his replies. He genuinely looked forward to seeing the young man in Moscow for a splendid and very public celebration in two days’ time.

‘Thank you, Nikita Sergeyevich,’ Gagarin signed off. ‘Thank you again for the confidence placed in me, and I assure you I’m willing to carry out any further assignment for our country.’

He was thinking about the moon, perhaps. After all, Korolev had pressed a replica of a lunar spaceship’s plaque into his hand just before he took off and said that one day he might pick up the original . . .

The halt at Engels was little more than a rest-stop, a chance to make those necessary phone calls and switch to a more powerful aircraft. Gagarin boarded an Ilyushin-14 for Kuibishev (today called Samara), another large town on the Volga about 350 kilometres north-east of Saratov. Here he would rest for a day or so, before heading for Moscow early on April 14.

An hour after Gagarin’s rocket had left the launch pad, Titov, Gallai, Kamanin and a substantial delegation from Baikonur boarded an Antonov-12 plane bound for Kuibishev. Korolev was the most notable absentee from the Antonov’s passenger list. He was still monitoring the communications from distant radio ground stations and listening ships, which were tracking the final phase of Vostok’s orbit and descent. (He and Ivanovsky flew out later to supervise the ball’s recovery from the Saratov region.)

Titov’s mood was strange, perhaps rather surly. ‘We landed at Kuibishev airbase, which was also a big factory facility for making passenger aircraft. Then Yura arrived by Ilyushin-14. He was brought from the Saratov area. He was surrounded by Generals, and I was just a Senior Lieutenant with very small shoulder-straps, as they say. But I was interested to know: what was the weightlessness like? Yura was walking down the gangway, and I pushed everyone aside. All of them looked at me. “Who’s this lunatic Lieutenant?” they said. We other cosmonauts were top-secret [unknown] people, so to say. But I reached Yura. “How was the weightlessness?” I asked. “It’s all right,” he said. That was our first meeting after his flight.’

The airfield’s perimeter fences were buckling under the weight of curious onlookers, who all knew what was afoot. Kuibishev was seething with exultant crowds when Gagarin’s car left the airbase and passed along the city’s main street escorted by motorcycle police and so forth. ‘Someone in the crowd threw a bicycle under the car’s wheels because they wanted Yura to stop and say hello. The car swerved to avoid an accident,’ says Titov, who was in the car behind. ‘I don’t recall if the bicycle was damaged, but people wanted very much to see him.’

On the outskirts of Kuibishev, a special dacha on the banks of the Volga had been prepared so that Gagarin could take a medical examination and get a day’s rest before flying to Moscow early on April 14. Oleg Ivanovsky remembers meeting him there and giving him a huge hug. ‘I asked him, “How are you feeling?” and Gagarin replied, “What about you? You should have seen yourself at the launch pad when you opened the hatch. Your face went every colour of the rainbow!” Everyone was rushing up to him, but I didn’t lose my head. I gave him that morning’s newspaper, and he wrote me a few kind words alongside the front-page photograph of him wearing his helmet. Everybody involved with Vostok was coming up to him and asking: