I first met Derk Sauer in Moscow in 1992, amid the ruins of the Soviet Union. I'd fallen in with journalists at a new English-language newspaper called The Moscow Times, and I often hung around the paper's office in a Radisson hotel. You could pop straight from your desk into a hotel-room shower, which was quite handy in Moscow then. One day I met the paper's founder: a tiny Dutchman, who, amid his eager young staff, resembled a bespectacled scoutmaster.
Sauer is still in Moscow. Last week I visited him in his latest office, in a Soviet-era building that's a comedown from the Radisson. But by now he's a Russian media mogul. Moreover, he's an excellent observer of the country, with his journalist's eye, mogul's contacts and experience of a long-term resident whose sons went to Russian schools. Sauer can judge whether President Vladimir Putin is taking Russia and its media back to the Brezhnev era.
A teenage Maoist and, later, a war correspondent, Sauer landed in Moscow in 1989. Despite speaking no Russian, he was too fascinated to leave. He and his wife Ellen Verbeek gave Russians western titles such as Playboy and Men's Health, and newspapers such as Vedomosti (a joint venture involving the FT). Their biggest hit, Russian Cosmopolitan, became Europe's bestselling glossy; Sauer says it “changed the way women here view the world”. He still chairs his original venture, now called Sanoma Independent Media, which has 60 per cent of the Russian magazine market. But he's simultaneously president of RBK Media, Russia's main provider of business news. (Declaration of interest: Sauer's Dutch publishing house published a book of mine.)