Richard Balmforth
Robert Eksuzyan
Monday 26 September 2011
In my first month at the Reuters Moscow bureau I was out of my depth. I spent a lot of time sitting miserably at my screen, trying to pretend to be busy.
At the end of one very long morning, I felt a pair of hands grab me by the shoulders. They shook me roughly for a good 20 seconds. When the quake subsided I turned to see a grinning round face topped with a scrag of white hair.
“That is how we do it in Abkhazia,” the old man said, then walked off cackling. It worked too. It cheered me up for the rest of the day.
That was how I met Robert Eksuzyan [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan]. He was, for me and I think for generations of Moscow correspondents, the soul of the Reuters bureau: translator, organiser, raconteur, librarian, eccentric smoking companion and friend.
Robert could always be relied on to add extreme random-ness to almost any situation. In the build-up to the Iraq War when the question of Russia’s veto at the United Nations was of crucial significance, the bureau chief and two senior correspondents were deep in conclave about the potential consequences. For Robert, it was an irresistible opportunity. He stomped up to them and waited to be noticed. Eventually one of them asked irritably what he wanted.
“Abkhazia will crush the United States,” he said, and stomped off, chuckling.
He left Reuters in 2008. I had also left the company by then, but I remembered him very fondly so when I was in Abkhazia in 2009 researching a book that never got anywhere I decided to look him up. It was a spur of the moment decision, I had no idea of his address so I just wandered the streets of Gagra looking for people who might know him.
It did not take long. The first woman I asked grabbed my hand and marched me to his door. I knocked and he opened in his underpants. He had been watching a football match, but squealed at the sight of me and shook me warmly by the hand.
For the rest of the day, I felt like a visiting dignitary. Everyone here had heard all about Reuters in Moscow, and his foreign friends, but I was the first of these Westerners to turn up for years. I met his son, and his wife, and his cousins and his friends. Even the ladies in the market were interrupted in their work and told to meet his Reuters colleague.
It was a sign of how much he loved Reuters that he took so much trouble to show me off to his friends. And it is a sign of how much his friends loved him that they were interested in me. When Richard Balmforth – who was, incidentally, one of those senior correspondents in conclave at the time of the Iraq War – rang me to tell me he had passed away, it felt like the end of an era.
But I hope his spirit will stop by the Moscow bureau to cheer up young correspondents with a vigorous shaking; and to wind up the bosses every now and then too.
Oliver Bullough
nbnbn
At the end of one very long morning, I felt a pair of hands grab me by the shoulders. They shook me roughly for a good 20 seconds. When the quake subsided I turned to see a grinning round face topped with a scrag of white hair.
“That is how we do it in Abkhazia,” the old man said, then walked off cackling. It worked too. It cheered me up for the rest of the day.
That was how I met Robert Eksuzyan [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan]. He was, for me and I think for generations of Moscow correspondents, the soul of the Reuters bureau: translator, organiser, raconteur, librarian, eccentric smoking companion and friend.
Robert could always be relied on to add extreme random-ness to almost any situation. In the build-up to the Iraq War when the question of Russia’s veto at the United Nations was of crucial significance, the bureau chief and two senior correspondents were deep in conclave about the potential consequences. For Robert, it was an irresistible opportunity. He stomped up to them and waited to be noticed. Eventually one of them asked irritably what he wanted.
“Abkhazia will crush the United States,” he said, and stomped off, chuckling.
He left Reuters in 2008. I had also left the company by then, but I remembered him very fondly so when I was in Abkhazia in 2009 researching a book that never got anywhere I decided to look him up. It was a spur of the moment decision, I had no idea of his address so I just wandered the streets of Gagra looking for people who might know him.
It did not take long. The first woman I asked grabbed my hand and marched me to his door. I knocked and he opened in his underpants. He had been watching a football match, but squealed at the sight of me and shook me warmly by the hand.
For the rest of the day, I felt like a visiting dignitary. Everyone here had heard all about Reuters in Moscow, and his foreign friends, but I was the first of these Westerners to turn up for years. I met his son, and his wife, and his cousins and his friends. Even the ladies in the market were interrupted in their work and told to meet his Reuters colleague.
It was a sign of how much he loved Reuters that he took so much trouble to show me off to his friends. And it is a sign of how much his friends loved him that they were interested in me. When Richard Balmforth – who was, incidentally, one of those senior correspondents in conclave at the time of the Iraq War – rang me to tell me he had passed away, it felt like the end of an era.
But I hope his spirit will stop by the Moscow bureau to cheer up young correspondents with a vigorous shaking; and to wind up the bosses every now and then too.
Oliver Bullough
nbnbn
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
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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
In the dull Soviet world where most people in official or semi-official jobs were ultra-cautious around us correspondents, Robert [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan] was always the wonderful exception: a natural raconteur, he was warm-hearted, voluble, and often intentionally goading. He was also famously irritable and, though no great supporter of the regime, he would jump in and speak his mind if he thought a correspondent was coming out with empty anti-Soviet clap-trap. He loved a good argument and I’ve lost count of the number of blazing rows I had with the dear man in my three tours in Moscow bureau. Most of us ascribed his seeming hot-headedness to his southern homeland of Abkhazia, the breakaway region of Georgia.
A universal character, he loved the company of young folk whom he always encouraged. Towards women, he was gallantry itself. He once chewed out a Western colleague for divulging the age of a woman – of a “certain age” – whose birthday we were celebrating. He was a good friend to myself and Lynn in our early Brezhnev days, and – in our later tours – to our sons. My regret is that I never saw him in Gagra on his home patch where I like to think he had a reputation of being one of the town’s wise heads. Reuters indeed owed him a huge amount.
Richard Balmforth
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A universal character, he loved the company of young folk whom he always encouraged. Towards women, he was gallantry itself. He once chewed out a Western colleague for divulging the age of a woman – of a “certain age” – whose birthday we were celebrating. He was a good friend to myself and Lynn in our early Brezhnev days, and – in our later tours – to our sons. My regret is that I never saw him in Gagra on his home patch where I like to think he had a reputation of being one of the town’s wise heads. Reuters indeed owed him a huge amount.
Richard Balmforth
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