With 80 per cent of Russians getting their news from TV, the Russian president knows it’s the best place for propaganda
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.
