By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2011
An August 2011 FishbowlLA notice marked the death of a Los Angeles Times correspondent who had reported from one of the toughest beats of the Cold War.
Then
Murray Seeger, who spent 14 years at the LA Times from 1967 to 1981, died of pneumonia at 82. He was best known for running the paper’s Moscow bureau from 1972 to 1974.
His signature scoop was the last interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn before the dissident author was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. FishbowlLA relayed a detail from the Times’s own obituary: Seeger had so irritated Soviet authorities that a KGB colonel once called him the most disliked American correspondent since Harrison Salisbury.
After leaving the Times, Seeger became the information director for the AFL-CIO. FishbowlLA closed its brief notice with a simple ‘RIP.’
Now
Seeger belonged to a generation of foreign correspondents whose work defined Cold War-era American journalism — reporters posted for years to adversary capitals, filing under constant official scrutiny.
The Moscow bureau he ran was the kind of sustained, expensive overseas posting that decades of newspaper contraction made increasingly rare; the foreign-correspondent corps that Seeger’s career represented thinned dramatically in the years after his death.
His exit from journalism into labor communications also traced a familiar path — the move from the newsroom into institutional communications work — that became one of the most common second acts for reporters as the industry’s economics tightened.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.