Derk Sauer, Champion of Free Press in a New Russia, Dies at 72

New York Times

a day ago

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.'
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