Robert Eksuzyan
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
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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
Robert [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan] – a law unto himself, with an inimitable short-fuse phone style, the kindest possible heart, and a wonderfully dirty laugh.
He’d lived the Reuters life forever, had a growled opinion about everything and everyone, understood the nuances of every piece of officialese, and always knew who to phone to find the real story. You really lived the changes in Russia with Robert in the slot. In the transition from Communism to whatever we're now calling what came next, it was his shopping trips, and views on what the presence or absence of sausage/vodka etc might mean for the national psyche, that swayed even the most Stockmann-centric staff in the bureau.
I remember often being scared or worried with him, but often charmed too that, on reflection, he’d sometimes let himself be talked down from the more alarmist stories that often did the rounds during my time in Moscow. How to forget his panic at the news, one night in autumn 1991, that the average Russian male’s calorie intake was down to just 3,000 a day because sugarlumps and vodka were so hard to come by – “golod i kholod! Missis Vanorrra, you must write that starvation threatens Russia!” – and his subsequent reluctant laughter when I said we couldn’t run a story warning of imminent starvation based on that one fact if we wanted it to be taken seriously by, say, Californians, whose daily calorie intake would never, ever exceed 1,800 sugar- and vodka-free calories a day.
Especially for a person of such strong opinions, I actually found him extraordinarily even-handed – nothing worse than dark laughter at my report from Azerbaijan that a foreign ministry flak there had gone into a deep gloom at discovering our fixer’s name, complaining that, if Reuters had a fixer called something as Armenian as Eksuzyan, there was no way we’d give Azerbaijan a fair hearing in our reporting; as always, Robert had done absolutely impeccable fixing so the Azeris, like everyone else, did in fact get as good a hearing as was humanly possible.
How very sad that he’s gone. I will miss him.
Vanora Bennett
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He’d lived the Reuters life forever, had a growled opinion about everything and everyone, understood the nuances of every piece of officialese, and always knew who to phone to find the real story. You really lived the changes in Russia with Robert in the slot. In the transition from Communism to whatever we're now calling what came next, it was his shopping trips, and views on what the presence or absence of sausage/vodka etc might mean for the national psyche, that swayed even the most Stockmann-centric staff in the bureau.
I remember often being scared or worried with him, but often charmed too that, on reflection, he’d sometimes let himself be talked down from the more alarmist stories that often did the rounds during my time in Moscow. How to forget his panic at the news, one night in autumn 1991, that the average Russian male’s calorie intake was down to just 3,000 a day because sugarlumps and vodka were so hard to come by – “golod i kholod! Missis Vanorrra, you must write that starvation threatens Russia!” – and his subsequent reluctant laughter when I said we couldn’t run a story warning of imminent starvation based on that one fact if we wanted it to be taken seriously by, say, Californians, whose daily calorie intake would never, ever exceed 1,800 sugar- and vodka-free calories a day.
Especially for a person of such strong opinions, I actually found him extraordinarily even-handed – nothing worse than dark laughter at my report from Azerbaijan that a foreign ministry flak there had gone into a deep gloom at discovering our fixer’s name, complaining that, if Reuters had a fixer called something as Armenian as Eksuzyan, there was no way we’d give Azerbaijan a fair hearing in our reporting; as always, Robert had done absolutely impeccable fixing so the Azeris, like everyone else, did in fact get as good a hearing as was humanly possible.
How very sad that he’s gone. I will miss him.
Vanora Bennett
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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
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
How very sad that dear Robert has died [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan]. Like Bob Evans I was in the Moscow bureau when he joined us as our third translator. He proved to be worth his weight in gold.
He and I were alone in the office at Sad Sam one quiet morning in about 1971, probably a Sunday. The telephone rang. Robert picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, then became more incandescent than ever I saw him before or since. It was his sister on the line from Gagra alerting him to his daughter’s elopement with a young Russian on the overnight train to Moscow. The language that ensued flew in the face of everything we had ever learned about the friendship of peoples.
All was not lost, for life itself teaches us that trains take their time to reach Moscow from the Caucasus. Robert was at the station to meet it.
No more was heard until a few months later he invited Patricia and me to his daughter’s wedding in Gagra. Apart from being a great honour, it was also a rare opportunity to see part of life in the USSR that was usually hidden from us. The appropriate authorities were somehow squared; there were no Kafkaesque foreign ministry shenanigans. On the appointed day we took the plane to Adler.
Armenian weddings, we were told, last for three days, though we were not expected to stay the whole course. We visited Robert’s widowed mother in a fine traditional house that stood before a grove of orange trees. We stayed with his sister, who worked for the Interior Ministry (not sure whether Soviet, Georgian or Abkhaz) and lived in a fairly substantial block of flats. In her second floor apartment cold water was stored in the bath to ensure continuous supply.
The wedding, at an outdoor restaurant, was a lavish affair attended by every kind of nationality to be found in a place like Gagra, Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Abkhazes, Jews and of course Armenians.
The groom was Armenian.
The tamada had to last the course for three days, and to boost his staying power he interspersed his toasts with tumbler-sized chasers of the brine in which you conserve gherkins. There was plenty of vigorous dancing, and it was much to Robert’s embarrassment when his boss from Moscow accepted an invitation to join in.
While we were there Robert took us on a trip to Pitsunda on the regular local bus. He forewarned us that it might get held up at some point because the Abkhazes had a great tendency to fall out with one another and start a fight. As he so often was at work in Moscow, Robert was spot on. Fortunately the fight was at a bus stop, not on the vehicle.
After the fall of communism he paid one or two visits to London, where he was shocked at the variety of foodstuffs available in the shops for pet animals.
When Jacquie and I spent a week in Moscow in 2000, on our way eastwards to Kamchatka and the US, Robert entertained us in his home and took us to the Great Patriotic War Memorial which had appeared out along Kutuzovsky since my days as a Moscow correspondent. It was a great opportunity to learn more of his life history. We had known that his father was the Aeroflot representative in Gagra, but Robert told me his grandfather had been the priest at an Armenian parish somewhere in the hills behind Gagra. When the church was reconsecrated in the 1990s, Robert said he was invited to attend and was feted by the Armenian parishioners. He only went to church once a year himself and showed us the Russian Orthodox Church near his flat where he went each Easter. He was visibly shocked when I told him that one of his former Reuters bosses was an atheist.
As a teenager he recalled that he and a couple of mates found an unexploded artillery shell on the Black Sea shore and were pelting it with stones, or hammering at it with some other implement. Fortunately they were apprehended in time, or none of us would ever have had the benefit of his wisdom and humour. After this incident his father had him sent away to a boarding school. Robert said this was the making of him.
With treasured memories of a well-loved colleague.
Andrew Waller
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He and I were alone in the office at Sad Sam one quiet morning in about 1971, probably a Sunday. The telephone rang. Robert picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, then became more incandescent than ever I saw him before or since. It was his sister on the line from Gagra alerting him to his daughter’s elopement with a young Russian on the overnight train to Moscow. The language that ensued flew in the face of everything we had ever learned about the friendship of peoples.
All was not lost, for life itself teaches us that trains take their time to reach Moscow from the Caucasus. Robert was at the station to meet it.
No more was heard until a few months later he invited Patricia and me to his daughter’s wedding in Gagra. Apart from being a great honour, it was also a rare opportunity to see part of life in the USSR that was usually hidden from us. The appropriate authorities were somehow squared; there were no Kafkaesque foreign ministry shenanigans. On the appointed day we took the plane to Adler.
Armenian weddings, we were told, last for three days, though we were not expected to stay the whole course. We visited Robert’s widowed mother in a fine traditional house that stood before a grove of orange trees. We stayed with his sister, who worked for the Interior Ministry (not sure whether Soviet, Georgian or Abkhaz) and lived in a fairly substantial block of flats. In her second floor apartment cold water was stored in the bath to ensure continuous supply.
The wedding, at an outdoor restaurant, was a lavish affair attended by every kind of nationality to be found in a place like Gagra, Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Abkhazes, Jews and of course Armenians.
The groom was Armenian.
The tamada had to last the course for three days, and to boost his staying power he interspersed his toasts with tumbler-sized chasers of the brine in which you conserve gherkins. There was plenty of vigorous dancing, and it was much to Robert’s embarrassment when his boss from Moscow accepted an invitation to join in.
While we were there Robert took us on a trip to Pitsunda on the regular local bus. He forewarned us that it might get held up at some point because the Abkhazes had a great tendency to fall out with one another and start a fight. As he so often was at work in Moscow, Robert was spot on. Fortunately the fight was at a bus stop, not on the vehicle.
After the fall of communism he paid one or two visits to London, where he was shocked at the variety of foodstuffs available in the shops for pet animals.
When Jacquie and I spent a week in Moscow in 2000, on our way eastwards to Kamchatka and the US, Robert entertained us in his home and took us to the Great Patriotic War Memorial which had appeared out along Kutuzovsky since my days as a Moscow correspondent. It was a great opportunity to learn more of his life history. We had known that his father was the Aeroflot representative in Gagra, but Robert told me his grandfather had been the priest at an Armenian parish somewhere in the hills behind Gagra. When the church was reconsecrated in the 1990s, Robert said he was invited to attend and was feted by the Armenian parishioners. He only went to church once a year himself and showed us the Russian Orthodox Church near his flat where he went each Easter. He was visibly shocked when I told him that one of his former Reuters bosses was an atheist.
As a teenager he recalled that he and a couple of mates found an unexploded artillery shell on the Black Sea shore and were pelting it with stones, or hammering at it with some other implement. Fortunately they were apprehended in time, or none of us would ever have had the benefit of his wisdom and humour. After this incident his father had him sent away to a boarding school. Robert said this was the making of him.
With treasured memories of a well-loved colleague.
Andrew Waller
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
I remember Robert [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan] telling me exactly what to write on one of those winter days when sports desk asked for soccer stories from one of those endless rounds of European matches. Someone was playing someone with a white soccer ball on a snow-covered Moscow pitch. I had no clue what was going on, except that the players found it incredibly hard to stay upright, but Robert excitedly steered me through the story. I wish I could remember who played and who won, but that memory escapes me.
Janet Guttsman
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Janet Guttsman
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
I remember travelling to Odessa with Robert [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan] in 1985 to report on a European football tie between Real Madrid and Chernomorets.
We stayed up very late after the game drinking whisky and Robert talked to me about how in the early 1950s the mere name alone of Lavrenti Beria was enough to send shudders of raw fear down his spine and those of his friends. The disclosure of Beria's death was a cause for massive celebration.
Robert also was the Reuters man who first spotted the Tass announcement of Gorbachev’s appointment as CPSU general secretary in March 1985. He happened to be making himself a cup of strong tea in the kitchen of the office at Sad Sam – and the Russian-language Tass machine was kept in the kitchen. I saw him running into the main office room waving the piece of Tass copy and shouting: "Eto Gorbachev! Eto Gorbachev!"
Tony Barber
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We stayed up very late after the game drinking whisky and Robert talked to me about how in the early 1950s the mere name alone of Lavrenti Beria was enough to send shudders of raw fear down his spine and those of his friends. The disclosure of Beria's death was a cause for massive celebration.
Robert also was the Reuters man who first spotted the Tass announcement of Gorbachev’s appointment as CPSU general secretary in March 1985. He happened to be making himself a cup of strong tea in the kitchen of the office at Sad Sam – and the Russian-language Tass machine was kept in the kitchen. I saw him running into the main office room waving the piece of Tass copy and shouting: "Eto Gorbachev! Eto Gorbachev!"
Tony Barber
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
I'm sorry to hear this [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan]. I worked with Robert from 1989 to 1995 and appreciated his sense of humour as well as his memory, knowledge and judgment.
“But this is very important,” he’d say, pointing out a development I’d overlooked or wrongly dismissed as irrelevant. As John [Morrison] said, his skills with a telephone were remarkable. In a previous life he must have been a safe breaker. At a time when calls from foreign news outlets tended to prompt officials to respond with a “No” or “Go away and don’t contact us again”, Robert would hector, flatter and cajole the person on the other end into giving away far more than they intended or realised. This skill proved to be particularly valuable in the last few years of the Soviet Union, when the heavily overworked six-person Moscow bureau had to cover the rise of nationalist movements in the Baltics and increasingly brutal ethnic tensions in the Caucasus. Later on this had a personal impact on Robert, who would fret about the damage done to his beloved Gagra during the Abkhaz war. Yet he was rarely subdued for long and his irrepressible sense of humour is just one of the reasons why it was a privilege to work with him.
David Ljunggren
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“But this is very important,” he’d say, pointing out a development I’d overlooked or wrongly dismissed as irrelevant. As John [Morrison] said, his skills with a telephone were remarkable. In a previous life he must have been a safe breaker. At a time when calls from foreign news outlets tended to prompt officials to respond with a “No” or “Go away and don’t contact us again”, Robert would hector, flatter and cajole the person on the other end into giving away far more than they intended or realised. This skill proved to be particularly valuable in the last few years of the Soviet Union, when the heavily overworked six-person Moscow bureau had to cover the rise of nationalist movements in the Baltics and increasingly brutal ethnic tensions in the Caucasus. Later on this had a personal impact on Robert, who would fret about the damage done to his beloved Gagra during the Abkhaz war. Yet he was rarely subdued for long and his irrepressible sense of humour is just one of the reasons why it was a privilege to work with him.
David Ljunggren
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
Sad news [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan], he was a super person. It is extraordinary that two such great (for Reuterian) figures of the Cold War era – Robert, and Erdmute Greis-Behrendt in Berlin – should pass away within a few weeks of each other.
Adam Kellett-Long
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Adam Kellett-Long
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
Robert [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan] was the absolute mainstay of the bureau during my years in Moscow, first in the late 70s and then 83-86. We were a four-person team in those days. I relied on his knowledge and wisdom on all things Soviet. He averted quite a few scrapes for us and he educated me, a non-Russian graduate, in the language (especially the rude side) and habits of the country. His Caucasian humour was an antidote to the strains in our little Sad Sam office especially in those long grey and muddy months.
Charles Bremner
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Charles Bremner
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
Though at times exasperating, Robert [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan] was a man of integrity at a time when that wasn't easy. He, I, Steve Parry and Derek Parr were all denounced by name in Sovetsky Sport after we requested permission to interview the Israeli team at the World Student Games in Moscow in 1973. The rest of us could laugh about it – but it wasn't so funny for him.
Patrick Worsnip
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Patrick Worsnip
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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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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
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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
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
Very sad news [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan]. He was a very important figure for all of us. Great sense of humour, tremendous company. Vivid memories of him pacing the office, slapping his forehead in despair at the latest Pravda report of some factory producing sunglasses too dark to see through or a shop selling only left shoes.
Ralph Boulton
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Ralph Boulton
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
What sticks out was his enthusiasm, his excitement when he found some hot news item buried in the depths of Trud or the inside back page of Izvestia. Robert [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan] took enormous pride in spotting those hidden gems which did so much to make the bureau unique, pursuing the correspondent of the moment around the office until the story was written and despatched, watching over the copy to make sure we had it right. He was competitive; when the timings began to be fed back, Robert took it almost personally if we were behind.
And let’s not forget how much he helped us in our understanding of the labyrinthine world of Soviet politics. Before the days of Tolya Verbin and the other “local” correspondents, we foreigners relied upon Robert and his colleagues to interpret this strange world. He was always happy to explain what the appearance of a certain article meant, the mention of a name, the order that names were listed, an unexpected promotion or demotion. And so on. So much of the interpretation of events which made the bureau the bellwether of the Moscow press corps had its origins in conversations with Robert and his colleagues.
I still remember the day during the convulsions of the Soviet collapse when Robert, after hours of dialling, got through to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the deposed Georgian president, then in exile in Chechnya. His interview was exclusive and ground-breaking and was published around the world, under his byline.
Oliver Wates
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And let’s not forget how much he helped us in our understanding of the labyrinthine world of Soviet politics. Before the days of Tolya Verbin and the other “local” correspondents, we foreigners relied upon Robert and his colleagues to interpret this strange world. He was always happy to explain what the appearance of a certain article meant, the mention of a name, the order that names were listed, an unexpected promotion or demotion. And so on. So much of the interpretation of events which made the bureau the bellwether of the Moscow press corps had its origins in conversations with Robert and his colleagues.
I still remember the day during the convulsions of the Soviet collapse when Robert, after hours of dialling, got through to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the deposed Georgian president, then in exile in Chechnya. His interview was exclusive and ground-breaking and was published around the world, under his byline.
Oliver Wates
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Robert Eksuzyan
Sunday 25 September 2011
Robert [● Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan] was very proud of his Gagra garden – around his mother Tamara Alexandrovna’s house where he took Doodie and I down to stay for a few days in the mid-1970s – and of course of the mandarins he grew there, hundreds of which he would lug back to Moscow after trips down there for all of us and our children.
It was after our Gagra visit that he was put on the carpet by UPDK, told he was too friendly with the capitalist hacks, and instructed to tell me that he no longer wanted to work for Reuters. Which he did, very uncomfortably, but begging me not to make an issue of it. He told me the story, and some others about the pressures he and all our other Soviet staff were subjected to, only in the late Gorbachev period and even then out on the Sad Sam balcony.
Bob Evans
Bob Evans’ children also remember Robert Eksuzyan.
Daughter Taina, who spent much of her childhood in Moscow where the family lived in the bureau chief's apartment a floor above the Sad Sam office, writes: I still think of Robert every year when the tangerines show up in the shops here. I remember him regularly turning up at home not long before Christmas with a massive bag that was bigger than I was!
Son Beren writes: I have fond memories of Robert chasing me out of the office when he thought I might distract my father from working. But when it was quiet he used to take me down to the office kitchen and tell me stories about Soviet footballers.
Daughter Kyla writes: Growing up in Moscow in the 70s, and living just above the Reuter office, Robert was quite a part of our lives. I have an abiding picture of him at his desk in the office, behind a stack of newspapers, cutting out articles.
Christmas wouldn’t have been Christmas without Robert. Every year, he brought us a huge bag of tangerines, one of which would find its way into our Christmas stockings. I still think of them here in Brussels when the tangerine season starts.
On his first trip out of the USSR, my father brought him to visit me at Oxford university. We went into Hall for a formal dinner – and I remember how much he enjoyed dressing up in the gown and carrying a mortar board, and even standing up for the grace.
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It was after our Gagra visit that he was put on the carpet by UPDK, told he was too friendly with the capitalist hacks, and instructed to tell me that he no longer wanted to work for Reuters. Which he did, very uncomfortably, but begging me not to make an issue of it. He told me the story, and some others about the pressures he and all our other Soviet staff were subjected to, only in the late Gorbachev period and even then out on the Sad Sam balcony.
Bob Evans
Bob Evans’ children also remember Robert Eksuzyan.
Daughter Taina, who spent much of her childhood in Moscow where the family lived in the bureau chief's apartment a floor above the Sad Sam office, writes: I still think of Robert every year when the tangerines show up in the shops here. I remember him regularly turning up at home not long before Christmas with a massive bag that was bigger than I was!
Son Beren writes: I have fond memories of Robert chasing me out of the office when he thought I might distract my father from working. But when it was quiet he used to take me down to the office kitchen and tell me stories about Soviet footballers.
Daughter Kyla writes: Growing up in Moscow in the 70s, and living just above the Reuter office, Robert was quite a part of our lives. I have an abiding picture of him at his desk in the office, behind a stack of newspapers, cutting out articles.
Christmas wouldn’t have been Christmas without Robert. Every year, he brought us a huge bag of tangerines, one of which would find its way into our Christmas stockings. I still think of them here in Brussels when the tangerine season starts.
On his first trip out of the USSR, my father brought him to visit me at Oxford university. We went into Hall for a formal dinner – and I remember how much he enjoyed dressing up in the gown and carrying a mortar board, and even standing up for the grace.
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