Robert Eksuzyan

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”. ■