One day in 1989, Dutch magazine editor Derk Sauer asked his wife if she fancied moving to Moscow, where he had been offered a job. \u201cCan\u2019t we go to America?\u201d she replied. Still, they moved with their baby into a cockroach-ridden flat in a city of bread queues.<\/p>\n
Over the following decades, Sauer \u2014 who has died aged 72 after a sailing accident \u2014 fell for Russia, and became a Moscow media magnate, a rare westerner to make his fortune there.\u00a0In the early 1990s, he founded The Moscow Times, an English-language news outlet that endures to this day, as well as the Russian editions of magazines including Cosmopolitan and Playboy.<\/p>\n
He started life on Amsterdam\u2019s Stalinlaan, which was later renamed after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He rebelled against his conservative father, who ran a pension fund, but identified with his mother\u2019s cousin, a wartime Resistance hero. <\/p>\n
Sauer founded the \u201cAction Group for World Peace\u201d, aged 14, demonstrated against the Vietnam war and became a Maoist, prompting the Dutch intelligence service to spy on him for nearly 20 years. Reading his file later, he commented: \u201cHalf the information was wrong.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Snubbing university, he tried to join the working class and briefly worked in a chewing-gum factory. But he preferred journalism. He had presented a national TV programme, aged 16, and in 1970 set up as correspondent in Northern Ireland, where, he later admitted, he also smuggled weapons in his car for the paramilitary Irish Republican Army. \u201cObviously they were used for attacks,\u201d he told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant in 2013. He later rejected the IRA, saying he realised it was chiefly a mafia.<\/p>\n
He spent the 1980s editing the Dutch weekly Nieuwe Revu with his winning formula of \u201csex, news and rock & roll\u201d. But he found life too easy in his quiet home country. When an official delegation of Russian journalists (including KGB agents) came looking for a Dutch business partner, someone suggested the \u201ccommunist\u201d Sauer. It was an offer he could not resist.<\/p>\n
On February 24, 1990 he drove to Russia in a car packed with basic necessities. Knowing the horror stories about Russian hospitals, the Sauers even brought their own blood plasma.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The born journalist proved a born businessman, too. A giant market with almost no consumer products was an entrepreneur\u2019s dream. His Dutch biographer Dido Michielsen wrote that Sauer\u2019s appearance \u2014 he was a tiny man from a small country with a friendly smile \u2014 lulled people into complacency, allowing him to achieve his ends. \u201cIf I have one talent, it\u2019s that I can make something happen,\u201d Sauer told De Morgen in 2011. <\/p>\n
In 1992 he launched the English-language The Moscow Times newspaper initially based at the Radisson Slavyanska hotel, where he resembled a bespectacled scoutmaster among his eager young journalists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Two years later, his company, Independent Media, started a Russian edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, edited by his wife and fellow journalist, Ellen Verbeek. The small editorial office operated out of an apartment building, according to his biographer. To keep nosy neighbours from asking too many questions, Sauer initially cleaned the office and toilets himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He said Russian Cosmo became Europe\u2019s bestselling magazine. Readers would phone to say, \u201cThanks to you, I finally left my drunken husband.\u201d <\/p>\n
Sauer launched Russian editions of dozens of magazines including Playboy, Men\u2019s Health and, his personal passion, Yoga Journal. Together with partners including the Financial Times, he co-founded the business newspaper Vedomosti. He said his newspapers were small enough that the regime left them alone. Independent Media offered western-style newsrooms and professional standards for generations of Russian journalists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Sauers eventually moved into the wealthy Moscow suburb of Zhukovka. With three sons in local schools, they socialised with the Russian elite. In his shaky Russian, Sauer conducted a delicate dance with the country\u2019s biznesmeny<\/em>, doing deals while trying to avoid danger. This was not easy: after Russian Playboy\u2019s editor was shot (he survived), Sauer went around with bodyguards for years.\u00a0<\/p>\n But he made it. He became a multimillionaire in 1998, selling shares in Independent Media. Sauer, Verbeek and their business partner Annemarie van Gaal celebrated with a shopping weekend in Paris, then went back to work. In 2005 Finnish publisher Sanoma bought Independent Media for \u20ac142mn. Sauer shared some of the proceeds with his staff, \u201cfrom drivers to directors\u201d, according to The Moscow Times\u2019 publisher Alexander Gubsky. Sauer\u2019s own wealth eventually peaked at \u20ac70mn, estimated Dutch business magazine Quote. <\/p>\n He also founded a Dutch publishing house, Nieuw-Amsterdam. (Disclosure: it has published my books.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Sauer told his biographer he morphed over time \u201cfrom socialist into journalist\u201d, and from youthful gunrunner into \u201cpacifist yogi\u201d. He backed the far-left Dutch Socialistische partij, saying, \u201cI\u2019m not against wealth, I\u2019m against poverty\u201d.<\/p>\n He deplored Vladimir Putin\u2019s growing authoritarianism, but stayed in Russia for the deep friendships, long winters with cross-country skiing, and daily excitement, wrote Michielsen. Dutch people saved for old age, Russians lived for now. He recounted his adventures in a weekly column in Amsterdam\u2019s Parool newspaper.<\/p>\n Sauer ran the media group RBK until the authorities forced him out in 2015. In 2017 he bought back his beloved Moscow Times. It and Vedomosti were \u201cthe little lights of independent journalism still burning\u201d, he said, in his old-fashioned Amsterdam accent, frozen in time after decades abroad.\u00a0<\/p>\n He divided his Moscow life into three periods: \u201cunlimited optimism\u201d in his first years, followed by \u201cunlimited consumption\u201d, and then \u201ccynicism\u201d. But on February 24, 2022 came horror, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin cracked down on the last independent media. Sauer fled Russia, writing on the day following the invasion: \u201cI am ashamed not to have warned enough against the tyrant of our time.\u201d Two years later, he teared up on Dutch TV after Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in a Siberian prison.<\/p>\n Separated from Russia, Sauer felt the deep Russian sadness known as \u201ctoska\u201d. Yet with undimmed energy, he helped move The Moscow Times and other independent media to Amsterdam, persuading Dutch authorities to accept a contingent of 150 Russian exiles. This year he launched a music label for Russian artists banned at home.<\/p>\n He died after injuring his back when his sailboat hit an underwater rock. He is survived by his wife Ellen, his three sons who dream in Russian, and The Moscow Times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Derk #Sauer #western #media #magnate #Russia #dies #aged<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One day in 1989, Dutch magazine editor Derk Sauer asked his wife if she fancied moving to Moscow, where he had been offered a job. \u201cCan\u2019t we go to America?\u201d she replied. Still, they moved with their baby into a cockroach-ridden flat in a city of bread queues. Over the following decades, Sauer \u2014 who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[673,668,198,672,671,311,669,670],"class_list":{"0":"post-713","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-aged","9":"tag-derk","10":"tag-dies","11":"tag-magnate","12":"tag-media","13":"tag-russia","14":"tag-sauer","15":"tag-western"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}