In the late 1980s, Dutch journalist Derk Sauer arrived in Moscow as a wide-eyed idealist. A former Marxist-Leninist radical back home – “I was a well-known radical in the Netherlands,” he recalls – Sauer was drawn by perestroika’s promise. He tells how, in 1988, a delegation of Soviet journalists visited his magazine in Amsterdam and urged him to come east. “They said, ‘Why don’t you come to Russia? We want to start a new publication,’” he remembers. Within months Sauer had moved to Moscow to become the editor of Moscow Magazine, the first Western-style glossy magazine for foreigners in the USSR. Those were heady days: rock concerts at Luzhniki Stadium, Western jeans in state stores and a sense that the old order was crumbling. “It was extremely romantic,” he smiles, looking back, “there was such a good vibe in those days, like the future was bright, peace was coming.”

In the summer of 1991, Sauer witnessed history – Boris Yeltsin’s famous standoff with tanks – as the Soviet Union tore itself apart. The young editor covered the coup as a foreign correspondent. By 1992 the Soviet Union had fallen, and Sauer saw a new opportunity. With foreign businesses pouring into Russia, he persuaded backers to let him launch an English-language daily. When his Dutch publisher balked – “a daily newspaper?… We’re not in business to make your dreams come true” – Sauer struck out on his own. With a small investment and borrowed hotel rooms as an office, he and a partner founded the Moscow Times in late 1992. He notes that Moscow then had “about 30,000 expats… This was Yeltsin time,” with new laws that “really opened the gates for foreign companies.” Within weeks the paper was printing and distributing thousands of copies, tapping the city’s booming expatriate community.

By mid-decade Sauer’s operation had diversified. The emerging Moscow Times was breaking even, but the profits came from magazines. Sauer and his wife Ellen dreamed up Cosmopolitan Russia. They even sold their house in Amsterdam to finance it. “Launching Cosmopolitan in 1994 saved us,” he says. Under Ellen’s editorship, Cosmopolitan Russia exploded in popularity. “Cosmopolitan basically created the magazine market in Russia,” Sauer recalls. Russian teens and young women snapped up the glossy issues by the boxful – “the first edition was 50,000 copies, but within a year, it grew to almost a million copies a month.” He laughs at the memory of boxers selling Cosmo on metro trains: enterprising students would buy stacks and resell them on the subway, before rushing back for more. Indeed, Sauer says, the magazine’s success built entire industries. Photographers, designers and ad executives were raised by Cosmopolitan, creating “a whole new distribution system… Everything was built on the success of Cosmopolitan.” The cascade of new titles – Russian Harper’s Bazaar, Playboy, Men’s Healthand others – transformed the Moscow media scene. “We launched one magazine after another and grew from 20 people to over a thousand employees in a couple of years,” he notes.

More than entertainment, these publications ushered social change. Sauer emphasizes that Cosmopolitantackled subjects never discussed openly in Soviet times. “It was the first to openly write about sex, relationships and domestic violence,” he says. He even received letters from readers saying the magazine empowered them to make significant life changes. In his view, Cosmopolitan “was a bible for young women in Russia and its impact cannot be overstated.” By touching on issues like abortion and marital abuse, it normalized conversations that generations of Russians had been taught to avoid.

Meanwhile, Sauer did not abandon news. In 1999 he cofounded Vedomosti, an independent business daily produced in partnership with the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. He recalls that many in Russia’s oligarch-controlled press thought the idea was crazy. But Sauer believed crises made opportunities: amid Russia’s financial crisis, launching in 1999 meant cheap billboards and a captive audience. He plastered the city with tongue-in-cheek ads boasting, “every oligarch can buy this newspaper in the kiosk.” The slogan was meant to underscore a point: “this paper is not for sale,” he explains. At the time, competing broadsheets like Kommersant were owned by tycoons such as Boris Berezovsky, so Sauer wanted Vedomosti to stand apart. He assembled a young, crusading team (the founding editor was a 23-year-old Leonid Bershidsky). To everyone’s surprise, it worked. “People still said this will never fly,” he admits, “but we had a very good team… and we just did it. It became extremely successful, both financially and in terms of influence.” By the early 2000s, Vedomosti’s circulation had climbed from 30,000 to about 100,000, read by “everyone from the president to all the CEOs and important people.” Sauer calls it “the paper of record in Russia” – perhaps his proudest achievement.

For a time, everything was going well. Independent Media Group, Sauer’s company, had built a new office in the old Soviet press district. He eventually sold the business (along with Vedomosti and the Moscow Times) to a Finnish publisher in 2005, staying on as chair until 2009. But the political winds were shifting. In the mid-2000s, under Vladimir Putin’s presidency, the Kremlin moved to squeeze out foreign influence in the press. Sauer notes that around 2006 a new media law capped foreign ownership at 20%. “This law began the end of many media companies,” he says. In the coming years, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and other partners pulled out and Sauer’s Independent Media slowly unraveled.

By the 2010s, that chapter of Sauer’s life had closed. He briefly revived the Moscow Times by buying it back around 2019, but Vedomosti’s fate was more ominous. In 2020 it was sold to a businessman linked to Rosneft, the state oil giant. The moment new Kremlin-friendly management took over, “the independent reporting stopped,” Sauer says. He describes how the editors resigned en masse in protest: “They [the new owners] took the Kremlin line, and the independent reporting stopped. This led to a mass resignation of the editors.”

Sauer and his collaborators refused to give up. In 2020 they launched a new outlet, VTimes, with many former Vedomosti journalists. It got off to a strong start with readers. But in early 2021, the Russian government intervened again. Sauer’s new media venture and even its Dutch-based support foundation were suddenly declared “foreign agents.” “The government declared both VTimes and the supporting foundation I had set up in the Netherlands as foreign agents, forcing us to close down,” he reports. In other words, the state effectively shut it down.

Sauer also looks back on another chapter: for six years starting in 2011, he ran RBC, oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov’s media holding. He turned that operation around, making it credible and profitable again. But the Kremlin, he says, “eventually got upset with our work… raided our offices and started legal proceedings against us. Prokhorov was forced to sell the company… and all the top staff, including myself, left RBC.” It was a familiar pattern: independent outlets running afoul of the regime.

Through it all, Sauer was unfazed in tone but clear-eyed. He observed that “the net result of free media… is basically closed now.” Yet he refused to call things hopeless. The generation he mentored in the 1990s may be sidelined today, but their legacy lives on. “If you look at how people think and behave and how they consume information on the internet, YouTube and social media, that’s largely the result of what independent media did,” he argues. In his view, the independent press of the 1990s and 2000s “laid the groundwork” for Russians’ current information habits and values. As he puts it, even if the companies he built have been destroyed by repression, “the spirit has not been destroyed.”