Robert Eksuzyan

I’m very sorry to hear of Robert’s death. 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. ■