John Morrison
Robert Eksuzyan
Monday 26 September 2011
What very sad news [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan].
What I always remember about Robert, from the first time we met in 1971 to the phone conversation four or five years ago (when Richard Balmforth kindly sent me an e-mail suggesting Robert would like a call), was his mischievous side.
I remember him bounding into the office day after day in 1973-1974 to read the latest on, first, the campaign against Sakharov and, then, the campaign against Solzhenitsyn which led to Solzhenitsyn’s arrest and exile. One morning, Robert told me he had taken to getting up earlier to get into work to find out the latest. I also remember him sending the driver out to buy the Builders’ Gazette, not a journal Reuters subscribed to, because, on his way from the metro, he had stopped to read the boards displaying the day’s papers and had seen a rattling good tale of ripped-off building materials in some racket, an “economic crime” that could bring the death penalty, giving one of those insights into the Soviet Union beyond the propaganda.
As John Morrison said, there were no pubs for us to go to in the 1970s, but, with Robert, I maybe had the next best, or even better, thing. In my trainee year, when Robert and I had been working a dayshift on a Saturday, he took to leading me off by bus and metro (unknown, I think, to anyone else in the bureau) to the basement studio of a Georgian artist friend, Shota. I never saw much of Shota’s art but he was a damned good host and always had a good spread of Georgian dishes to feed us on. The place was a regular haunt of Moscow Caucasians and the conversation there was remarkably free and jovial.
When I returned to Moscow on a second assignment, Robert took me back to Shota’s a couple of times, but then the atmosphere began to grow more and more tense, both inside the Soviet Union in general and in the bureau in particular. Robert whispered to me one day that, at the closed trial of a dissident, I had been named as one of the “bourgeois journalists” the defendant had frequented. After that, by a sort of common accord, our Saturday outings petered out.
There was an odd sequel to this: in mid-1975, after Reuters had posted me to Paris, I was walking round the corner of my street in Montmartre when I was hailed in Russian. A man of about 40 asked me “What are you doing here?” He was, it turned out, yet another Georgian artist who had married a Frenchwoman and was living in the building adjacent to my own. He remembered me, he said, from seeing me “at Shota’s place with Robert”.
Julian Nundy
nbnbn
What I always remember about Robert, from the first time we met in 1971 to the phone conversation four or five years ago (when Richard Balmforth kindly sent me an e-mail suggesting Robert would like a call), was his mischievous side.
I remember him bounding into the office day after day in 1973-1974 to read the latest on, first, the campaign against Sakharov and, then, the campaign against Solzhenitsyn which led to Solzhenitsyn’s arrest and exile. One morning, Robert told me he had taken to getting up earlier to get into work to find out the latest. I also remember him sending the driver out to buy the Builders’ Gazette, not a journal Reuters subscribed to, because, on his way from the metro, he had stopped to read the boards displaying the day’s papers and had seen a rattling good tale of ripped-off building materials in some racket, an “economic crime” that could bring the death penalty, giving one of those insights into the Soviet Union beyond the propaganda.
As John Morrison said, there were no pubs for us to go to in the 1970s, but, with Robert, I maybe had the next best, or even better, thing. In my trainee year, when Robert and I had been working a dayshift on a Saturday, he took to leading me off by bus and metro (unknown, I think, to anyone else in the bureau) to the basement studio of a Georgian artist friend, Shota. I never saw much of Shota’s art but he was a damned good host and always had a good spread of Georgian dishes to feed us on. The place was a regular haunt of Moscow Caucasians and the conversation there was remarkably free and jovial.
When I returned to Moscow on a second assignment, Robert took me back to Shota’s a couple of times, but then the atmosphere began to grow more and more tense, both inside the Soviet Union in general and in the bureau in particular. Robert whispered to me one day that, at the closed trial of a dissident, I had been named as one of the “bourgeois journalists” the defendant had frequented. After that, by a sort of common accord, our Saturday outings petered out.
There was an odd sequel to this: in mid-1975, after Reuters had posted me to Paris, I was walking round the corner of my street in Montmartre when I was hailed in Russian. A man of about 40 asked me “What are you doing here?” He was, it turned out, yet another Georgian artist who had married a Frenchwoman and was living in the building adjacent to my own. He remembered me, he said, from seeing me “at Shota’s place with Robert”.
Julian Nundy
nbnbn
Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
I’m very sorry to hear of Robert’s death [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan]. We always used to joke about his occasional misuse of English colloquialisms. I would love to have had a chance to explain to him the sense of “You had a good innings”. In the Brezhnev era Robert was the backbone of the bureau’s sports coverage, with an encyclopaedic knowledge, especially of football.
In the days before electronic memories, he was largely responsible for cutting and clipping our extensive archives of cuttings from the Soviet press; and he was always alert to the tiny phrases that helped us read between the lines and make sense of the official verbiage. He was also extremely effective on the telephone, arguing on our behalf with bureaucrats or extracting scraps of information.
Working with foreign correspondents was a potential minefield of conflicting loyalties for any Soviet citizen; we all knew that despite sitting next to each other in the office for hours each day, neither side could afford the risk of mixing socially. So there were no cheerful nights spent in the pub together. In fact there weren’t any pubs. But I still counted Robert as a friend and was delighted to see him still working when I revisited Moscow in the early 1990s. Those who came to Moscow in later years probably never realised how much Reuters owed him.
John Morrison
nbnbn
In the days before electronic memories, he was largely responsible for cutting and clipping our extensive archives of cuttings from the Soviet press; and he was always alert to the tiny phrases that helped us read between the lines and make sense of the official verbiage. He was also extremely effective on the telephone, arguing on our behalf with bureaucrats or extracting scraps of information.
Working with foreign correspondents was a potential minefield of conflicting loyalties for any Soviet citizen; we all knew that despite sitting next to each other in the office for hours each day, neither side could afford the risk of mixing socially. So there were no cheerful nights spent in the pub together. In fact there weren’t any pubs. But I still counted Robert as a friend and was delighted to see him still working when I revisited Moscow in the early 1990s. Those who came to Moscow in later years probably never realised how much Reuters owed him.
John Morrison
nbnbn
Jack Henry
Wednesday 08 July 2009
Reading Jack Henry’s obituary in The Guardian with details of his distinguished war record has solved a very old mystery for me. Jack interviewed me for the graduate trainee entry to Reuters in 1971. At the time I was an Oxford undergraduate who was good at languages but had no journalistic background. “Mr Morrison, would you like to be a war correspondent and report the war in Vietnam?” he asked me. We were sitting in his office on the fourth floor of 85 Fleet Street, a few steps away from all those rattling old teleprinters surrounding the World Desk. “Not particularly,” I said. I added something to the effect that I had no desire to get shot in a war zone. He didn’t comment, but after the interview I was convinced I had said the wrong thing. I was amazed when Reuters offered me a traineeship.
Now I realise that Jack, having served in World War Two with the British army, had seen enough of war not to be interested in recruiting young men whose one ambition in life was to get as close as possible to the sound of gunfire. I now realise there was a lot more to Jack Henry than I understood at the time.
John Morrison
Now I realise that Jack, having served in World War Two with the British army, had seen enough of war not to be interested in recruiting young men whose one ambition in life was to get as close as possible to the sound of gunfire. I now realise there was a lot more to Jack Henry than I understood at the time.
John Morrison
