Derk Sauer, who has died aged 72, was a Dutch media titan who helped facilitate the rise of Russian independent journalism, an institution that he fought to save even as all the others in his adopted country crumbled around him. His publications, the Moscow Times and Vedomosti, were powerhouses and proving grounds for many of the country’s leading Russian and foreign journalists, while glossies he published in Moscow, such as Cosmopolitan, pioneered that market and became, he would claim, a “bible for young women” in the newly emancipated Russia.
As Russia sank deeper into authoritarianism, Sauer backed embattled media projects and then finally returned to the Netherlands after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But he provided safe harbour for dozens of the country’s independent journalists who were working in exile awaiting a safer time – likely after Vladimir Putin dies – when they might return home.
He died at a family home in Domburg in the Netherlands as a result of injuries from a sailing accident. He had fallen down a stairwell on board his boat near Greece, which had struck an underwater rock, and underwent several operations before his death.
Sauer arrived in the Soviet Union in 1989 in a car with his wife, the journalist Ellen Verbeek, their seven-month-old son, and all the products they could carry (he would continue to ship in nappies and powdered milk from the Netherlands). His goal was to start a glossy magazine, but his local partners at the Russian Union of Journalists were “in fact old KGB guys”. Instead, he sought out “young journalists, real writers” through his only other contact, the music critic Artemy Troitsky, and established the short-lived Moscow Magazine, a plucky monthly that soon shut when the Dutch publisher lost interest.
But Sauer would wistfully recall the “romantic” mood in Moscow where “the future was bright”, despite hardships such as waking up at 4am to queue for petrol or living in a flat with a fridge full of cockroaches. And the question of how foreigners could navigate Russian life ultimately led to his first major publication: the Moscow Times, an English-language daily newspaper that he established in the rooms of the Sloviansk hotel in 1992 in exchange for advertising the hotel’s services.
That paper was the foundation of Sauer’s Independent Media, a company that got its big break with the rights to publish Cosmopolitan in 1994, co-founded the business daily Vedomosti in 1999, and was then sold in 2005 to the Finnish company Sanoma for a small fortune. The key to Sauer’s success, colleagues said, was his ability to navigate Russia’s red tape without succumbing to corruption, and a business acumen that could co-exist with his belief in quality journalism. “Any oligarch can buy our newspaper – at a kiosk,” read an early advertisement for Vedomosti, which was also backed by the publishers of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. “He was never corrupt, even when he was dealing with oligarchs, even when he was dealing with government people,” said Troitsky.
Sauer brought the can-do attitude of his experience as a war correspondent to the tumultuous world of Russian publishing. He was born in Amsterdam, the son of Hendrik, a pension fund manager, and Evelien (nee Geuze-Tazelaar). Derk was a convinced communist from childhood (he called himself a “14-year-old Maoist”), and told his conservative parents that he was travelling to study in Dublin at the age of 19, but quickly crossed into Northern Ireland to report on the conflict for, among others, the Dutch broadcasting company VPRO. (His parents only found out when they heard him reporting from Belfast on the radio.) He later admitted to once having smuggled guns for the IRA, though he downplayed the incident later and disavowed any connection to the group.
After Ireland he went on to report in Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Beirut, before he returned home and started a family with Verbeek. Bored in the Netherlands, he approached his wife in 1989 determined to have a new adventure. “Can’t we go to New York?” she asked, when he first pitched the move to Moscow.
The Moscow Times chronicled a unique moment in Russian history, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the paper’s young correspondents could freely enter a politician’s office or request sensitive documents. Sauer himself recalled walking into the KGB building and asking for the files on the Dutch communists, which he was readily given. “That was probably the most unbridled period of freedom of the press in history,” he mused. And then he added: “This could not last.”
It didn’t. Journalists increasingly became targets for government crackdowns and gangland assassinations. Sauer and his family had bodyguards for nearly a decade after a would-be assassin shot and paralysed the editor-in-chief of Playboy – a title that Sauer owned – in 2001.
And as Vladimir Putin arrived in the Kremlin in 1999, Sauer already hinted at some discontent with the country’s direction. Writing in the newspaper Het Parool about a concert by the Scorpions that year, he considered organising a reunion with the same friends he had seen the group with in 1989. “But what would we talk about?” he wrote in a column. “The dirty war in Chechnya? The wealth that never came for most? The never realised dreams? The new walls that have been built in Europe?”
In 2005, Sauer sold the Moscow Times and his other titles at the market’s peak, netting €142m. He remained in the media, eventually joining Russia’s RBC newspaper as publisher during a tumultuous period when it printed a series of explosive investigations, including one that identified Putin’s secret daughter as a senior Moscow State University official. The paper’s editor was replaced, and Sauer soon left.
In 2017, he bought back his beloved Moscow Times, which he turned into a digital product and said would continue to “report stories that won’t make it to other outlets”. But times had changed and media outlets were increasingly under pressure from the Kremlin. “Only one thing can make me leave: the inability to express myself freely and do my job as a journalist and publisher,” Sauer had said in the mid-2010s.
That time came in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. But as he left, he reached out to journalists from his publications and TV Rain, a leading independent television station, and invited them to move to his native Amsterdam. “Derk is the reason we are here,” said Mikhail Fishman, a television anchor and one of dozens of Russian journalists who were supported by Sauer.
Sauer is survived by his wife, and their three children, Tom, Pjotr (a Guardian reporter) and Berend.
• Derk Sauer, journalist and publisher, born 31 October 1952; died 31 July 2025
