Obituary: Robert Eksuzyan

But for several generations of correspondents, this irascible, short-fused but utterly endearing ethnic Armenian was much more than just a fixer: his honesty and integrity – despite the ideological pressures he worked under until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 – made him a loyal and reliable friend. He had a clear devotion to Reuters, and a deep respect for the correspondents who worked for it and their families. He was a hilarious raconteur – and he loved to provoke an argument too. Rows were always conducted with gusto, made all the more entertaining by his erratic English, a language he adored but which, to his great frustration, he had never mastered. This was a source of much amusement, though, to his colleagues. As John Morrison, a former Moscow bureau chief in the 1980s, said: “I would love to have had a chance to explain to him the sense of ‘You had a good innings’.” Most of us ascribed his hot-headedness to his Armenian blood and his upbringing in Abkhazia, the now breakaway region of Georgia. And how he loved to provoke us all – even when he was nearing the end of his long service! I recall him arriving for work one morning when he was well into his 70s, and announcing to the editorial floor with a raised, clenched fist: “One day, Abkhazia will bring the United States to its knees!”

Bob Evans, his bureau chief for much of the Brezhnev period, says he was hired in 1964 by then bureau chief Sidney Weiland not so much for his English, which was clearly dodgy, but for his potential as a fixer. It was an inspired decision. Seated in the old Reuters office in a lugubrious Soviet building known by its acronym of Sad Sam (Sadovo-Samtyochnaya), he would argue for hours on the phone with Soviet bureaucrats to get access to sporting events and even political information. Trawling through the columns of the intimidating Soviet broadsheets of the day, he would pounce on scraps of buried information – or more often notice what was not said – and draw conclusions that would put correspondents on the trail of a news story. His leads often led to page one stories round the world.

Robert was intensely proud of his father, an Abkhaz-Armenian Red Army officer who survived Stalin’s pre-war military purges and went on to beat a war-time death sentence and service in a ‘punishment battalion’ from which he was not expected to come back alive. It was memories of his father, rehabilitated in the 1950s, that made Robert a patriot – and though he loved the company of Western correspondents and deeply respected Western values he was no push-over for empty anti-Soviet propaganda. Having worked all his life for British bureau chiefs, though, he had an extraordinary admiration for the British. After the defeat or Argentina in the 1982 Falklands war, he observed: “I have been telling people for ages round here that Britain would win. Nobody believed me.” A high point of his life was a trip to England, his first ever outside the Soviet Union, to spend a week in Editorial when Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika had made travel possible for ordinary Soviet citizens. To his astonishment he found “there was food in the shops even outside London as well!” Bob Evans had taken him on a Saturday stroll down the high street in Sutton, Surrey.

A universal character and himself a boy at heart, he loved the company of young people whom he always encouraged. With women, he was chivalry itself. He once chewed out a Western colleague for divulging the age of a female colleague whose birthday we were celebrating, and told off more than one bureau chief when he thought they were not paying enough attention to their wives.

The extraordinary tributes from his colleagues, drawing on vivid memories, speak of a remarkable life lived to the full.

Having spent most of his life combing through the Soviet or Russian press, clipping out articles for potential news stories and filing them, he never made the adjustment to the full-blooded computer age when it dawned at Reuters. He retreated more into himself in the office and took out a lot of his frustration on the hi-tech of the day which stubbornly remained beyond his reach. But he soldiered on through three office moves – and at least one stroke – ending his working days in the present premises of Berlin House, giving us always the warmth of his company and benefit of his historical recall which was so useful.

“He considered Reuters his home,” his grandson, also called Robert, said.

He retired in 2008, after a 40-year-career in Reuters interrupted only by a period in the mid-1970s when he was ordered by the KGB to move to another news organisation because he had become – as they told him – “too friendly” with our “bourgeois correspondents”. He was allowed to return three years later after our well-connected office driver Zhora Nikitin who, like all our Soviet staff, loved him too, intervened with the authorities. For a while, after retirement, he stayed on in Moscow with his wife Anya, but then they moved back to Gagra for his last years in the family house he inherited when his mother died. He continued to care for its surrounding mandarine orchard which he had looked after throughout his adult life. ■