Derk Sauer, champion of a free press in a new Russia, dies at 72

Boston Globe

a day ago

Mr. Sauer, a lifelong socialist, continued to promote these freedoms after President Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999 and began dismantling Russia's nascent democracy.
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'He kept on defending journalism until his very last breath,' Pjotr Sauer, who writes for The Guardian, said in a phone interview Friday.
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Mr. Sauer was fatally wounded in a 'freak accident' while sailing with his wife, Ellen Verbeek, his son said.
Mr. Sauer was under the deck when the boat hit an underwater rock, causing him to fall from a set of stairs and land on his back, his son said. Mr. Sauer underwent surgery at a hospital in Athens before being transferred to a hospital in Amsterdam, where he spent 10 days, Pjotr Sauer said.
After leaving the hospital in Amsterdam, Mr. Sauer spent his final days at a family home in Zeeland with his wife and sons.
Mr. Sauer's ability to combine high-quality journalism with business acumen made him a wealthy man.
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He introduced glossy magazines to Russia, beginning with a highly successful local edition of Cosmopolitan. After decades of shortages and travel restrictions, Russians in the 1990s flocked to these aspirational titles for a taste of Western pop culture and consumerism.
Mr. Sauer's business newspaper, Vedomosti
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set the standard in Russia for reporting on the high-wire drama of the country's booming but corrupt capitalist economy.
His English-language newspaper, The Moscow Times, tapped into Russia's small but wealthy new community of expatriates. The paper became a training ground for some of the most prominent Russia experts in Western media, including Ellen Barry of The New York Times and David Filipov, a former Moscow bureau chief for The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.
'He brought Russia something they'd never seen, which was quality Western journalism,' Pjotr Sauer said.
Derk Erik Sauer was born on Oct. 31, 1952, into a well-off Amsterdam family. His father, Hendrik Sauer, ran a large pension fund, and his mother, Evelien Tazelaar, was a stay-at-home parent.
In media interviews, Derk Sauer said that he had rebelled against the social conventions imposed by his father, whom he described as a 'respectable man, incorruptible, exceptionally conscientious.'
As a teenager, he joined the Netherlands' small communist party and protested against the war in Vietnam. 'I was a 14-year-old Maoist,' Mr. Sauer said in an interview with The Moscow Times in 2017.
After graduating from high school, Mr. Sauer decided not to follow his two brothers to university. Instead, he reported for left-wing publications and campaigned for progressive causes. He briefly helped smuggle weapons for the Irish Republication Army, the paramilitary group that fought for the Irish republican cause in Northern Ireland.
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His antiestablishment activities made him a target of surveillance by Dutch intelligence services for nearly 20 years, Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported in 2023.
Mr. Sauer possessed unusually sharp business skills for a professed revolutionary.
In the 1980s, he turned the Dutch magazine he was editing, Nieuwe Revu, into a household name with a business strategy that he described as 'sex, news and rock 'n' roll.'
That reputation led to a job with the Dutch publishing house VNU, which in 1989 tapped him to start a glossy magazine in the Soviet Union. As the country's leader, Mikhail Gorbachev was relaxing the state's media monopoly under wide-ranging reforms that ended up collapsing the communist state.
The initial Russian magazine venture did not flourish. When VNU called him home in the early '90s, Sauer and his business partner, Annemarie van Gaal, decided to stay. They started a new media company, Independent Media.
Their big break came a few years later, when Hearst Magazines International gave them the license to publish Cosmopolitan in Russia.
It took persistence to convince Hearst, a conservative American media conglomerate, to hand over its flagship title to 'two Dutch people without a headquarters or any experience abroad,' van Gaal said in a phone interview.
Cosmopolitan became a major financial success in Russia, enabling van Gaal and Mr. Sauer to acquire local licenses for other publications, including Playboy, Good Housekeeping and Marie Claire.
The revenue from these titles helped Mr. Sauer to finance journalism projects in Russia that focused more on public-service reporting.
According to his associates, Mr. Sauer strongly believed in developing the skills of local journalists. He hoped to build in Russia an independent and financially successful media industry that would hold power to account, as it did in the Netherlands.
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Mr. Sauer offered his employees business courses in publishing and promoted a Master of Business Administration course, said Elizaveta Osetinskaya, a prominent Russian business journalist who worked with Mr. Sauer at Vedomosti.
'It was this combination of journalism and business that really drew me in,' she said in a phone interview Friday. 'I was thinking, 'One day I will be like Derk.''
In 2014, Mr. Sauer took charge of another Russian business publication, RBC, just as Putin annexed Crimea and steered Russia decisively away from Western-style democracy. Mr. Sauer brought in experienced reporters and editors, including Osetinskaya, and tasked them with turning RBC into a Western-style financial daily.
By 2016, the jig was up. Under pressure from the government, the paper's oligarch owner fired an RBC editor. The rest of the editorial team resigned in protest, and Mr. Sauer left soon after.
'Derk tried to sort it out, to protect his team and sail through the storm,' Osetinskaya said. 'But by then the country had changed. There was too much pressure.'
After Putin invaded Ukraine, Mr. Sauer became one of the most prominent champions of independent Russian journalists who had fled the country to escape repression. He used his connections and influence in the Netherlands to help Russia's main independent news channel, TV Rain, relocate to Amsterdam in 2023.
'Right now, it's blacker than black,' Mr. Sauer told Dutch television program Buitenhof after the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison last year. 'The rudeness, the cruelty, I just don't know what to do anymore,' he said. 'The repression and the fear are enormous.'
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In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Sauer is survived by two other sons, Tom and Berend, and two granddaughters.
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