Tatiana Ustinova celebrates 40 years at Reuters in Moscow

Tatiana joined Reuters on November 18, 1985, a day before a Geneva Summit when Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan met for the first time.

For four decades, Tatiana helped Reuters correspondents in Moscow navigate the strange worlds of the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia and Putin’s rule, including coups, mutinies, attacks, revolutions, the world's worst nuclear disaster and the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two.

Moscow received tributes to Tatiana from past and present colleagues, including Charles Bremner, Bob Evans, Ralph Boulton, Meg Bortin, David Ljunggren, Mark Trevelyan, Martin Nesirky, Richard Balmforth, Anatoly Verbin, Kevin Liffey, Michael Stott, Tim Heritage, Jon Boyle, Lidia Kelly, Christian Lowe and Andrew Osborn.

"Forty years ago, at the dawn of perestroika, Tanya was a young ray of sunshine when she joined our little Reuters team," said Bremner, Reuters Moscow Bureau Chief 1983-1986, who hired her.

"She immediately became part of the family and quickly adapted with good humour and kindness to the difficult demands of a Western reporting bureau in Soviet days," said Bremner, who is now Paris correspondent for The Times.

Colleagues noted Tatiana's keen intelligence, mischievous sense of humour, her wealth of knowledge on Russia and her passion for helping coverage even in the darkest - and most frenetic - moments of its recent history.

"Through a string of coups, uprisings, civil unrest and revolutions and even the occasional quiet evening shift, it was always a delight to have Tanya sitting the other side of the table," said Boulton, who was Moscow correspondent 1980-1982 and 1990-1994, and later Reuters Editor Political and General News for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Nesirky, Chief Correspondent and Moscow Bureau Chief 1997-2001, said that Tatiana had "accompanied Reuters on a journalistic and linguistic journey across four extraordinary decades and helped countless correspondents, with their idiosyncratic ways yet common aim of reporting accurately and compellingly."

"Along the way, often in a frenetic atmosphere, your reassuring presence has sustained the morale of the reporting staff and often brought balm to bruised egos," said Balmforth, Reuters correspondent in Moscow 1979-83, 1992-1996 and 2001-2007.

In Moscow, the bureau gave Tatiana flowers and an original Pravda newspaper from Nov. 18, 1985.

"It seems to me that the secret of your charm may be that you care; you care about the team, you care about us, you care about getting the news right, you care about Reuters," Moscow Bureau Chief Guy Faulconbridge told Tatiana.  

"That passion has made you dearly loved by many generations of people from Reuters. Thank you from Reuters and thank you from all of us."

Photos show Tatiana in the Moscow bureau in the early 1990s, reading her tributes with Guy Faulconbridge, Soheil Afdjei, chief of video and pictures CIS, and Shamil Zhumatov, chief photographer Russia and CIS, and a copy of Pravda from the day she arrived in the bureau.  ■