Derk Sauer, an idealistic Dutch media magnate who epitomized the lucrative yet brief muckraking days of a Russian free press, died on Thursday at a family home in Zeeland, the Netherlands. He was 72.
Mr. Sauer died from injuries he sustained about a month ago in a sailing accident off the Greek island of Corfu, one of his sons, Pjotr Sauer, said.
Derk Sauer moved to Russia in 1989 to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union as a crusading left-wing journalist. He ended up tying his life to the country, founding, publishing and managing various publications that reported on, and in turn helped shape, the economic and social freedoms of Russia’s freewheeling but violent 1990s.
Mr. Sauer, a lifelong socialist, continued to publicly defend these freedoms after President Vladimir V. Putin came to power in 1999 and began dismantling Russia’s nascent democracy.
“He kept on defending journalism until his very last breath,” Pjotr Sauer, who writes for The Guardian, said in a phone interview on Friday.
Mr. Sauer was fatally wounded while sailing with his wife, Ellen Verbeek, when the boat hit an underwater rock, his son said, describing it as a “freak accident.”
Mr. Sauer was walking up the stairs in the boat when it hit the rock, causing him to fall and land on his back, his son said. Mr. Sauer underwent surgery in 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 in a family home in Zeeland with his wife and sons.
Mr. Sauer’s entrepreneurialism, as a founder of the Independent Media company, made him a wealthy man. He introduced glossy magazines to Russia, acquiring the license from Hearst Magazines International to publish a local edition of Cosmopolitan and other lifestyle publications. 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, 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 Washington Post.
“He brought Russia something they’d never seen, which was quality Western journalism,” Pjotr Sauer said.
Mr. Sauer’s beginnings in Moscow were not glamorous. “We weren’t interested in luxury. We lived in a third floor walk-up,” Mr. Sauer told the Dutch newspaper Het Parool, where he wrote a column until the end of his life. “If you opened your refrigerator at night, cockroaches would crawl out.”
Derk Erik Sauer was born on Oct. 31, 1952, into a well-off Amsterdam family. His father ran a large pension fund. In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Sauer is survived by two other sons, Tom and Berend, and two granddaughters. Pjotr Sauer said his father was skilled at sailing, one of his “great passions,” along with cycling.
In media interviews, Mr. Sauer said that he rebelled against the social conventions imposed by his father, whom he described as a “respectable man, incorruptible, exceptionally conscientious.”
After school, Mr. Sauer campaigned for the Netherlands’ small communist political parties and reported for left-wing publications. He briefly helped smuggle weapons for the Irish Republication Army, the paramilitary group that fought for the Irish republican cause in Northern Ireland.
His anti-establishment activities made him a target of surveillance by the Dutch intelligence services for nearly 20 years, the Dutch publication NRC Handelsblad reported in 2023.
As a businessman, Mr. Sauer possessed an uncanny sense of timing. In 2005, he sealed the biggest print-media deal in Russian history, selling his business in the country to the Finnish company Sanoma for $142 million at a high point for the industry.
When Sanoma exited the Russian market a decade later, a combination of Mr. Putin’s media crackdown and the global decline of print left its publications valued at a fraction of that sum.
Mr. Sauer continued to invest in journalism and defend its mission long after its boom times ended.
After Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine, for example, 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, to relocate to Amsterdam in 2023.
“Right now, it’s blacker than black,” Mr. Sauer told Dutch television program Buitenhof after the death of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny in prison last year. “The rudeness, the cruelty, I just don’t know what to do anymore. The repression and the fear are enormous.”
Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Russia and its transformation following the invasion of Ukraine.
Claire Moses is a Times reporter in London, focused on coverage of breaking and trending news.
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