The Maoist who brought glamour to Moscow

But there was much, much more to Derk than that outward persona. It’s something I’m able to appreciate only now, three decades later, with Russia transformed into a very different place, and with the perspective I’ve gained from researching a PhD into Russia’s now-embattled independent media. What I now understand is that Derk, more than anyone I know, carved out space for rigorous and independent journalism to exist inside Russia.

In 1995, I was studying Russian at Edinburgh University and had been sent to Moscow for a year to improve my language. Bored with the course at Moscow State University, I applied for a job at The Moscow Times, an English-language daily that had begun in 1992.

The first time I met Derk was at lunch at the Aerostar, a plush new hotel catering for the growing numbers of Westerners heading to Moscow to do business. Every month, Derk threw a lavish welcome for all his new employees, holding forth at the top of the table about how The Moscow Times began and his plans for the future.

By then, Independent Media, his publishing house, had launched a number of glossy magazines in Russia — Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Playboy, to name just a few. These Russian editions of Western magazines were an instant hit, better quality than anything available in Russian at the time and offering a glimpse at the commercialism and glamour of western society that was now heading East.

Derk was busy with the magazines, but he spent a lot of time at The Moscow Times, the publication closest to his heart. He described himself as a Maoist, and as a young reporter for Dutch newspapers, he had covered many of the uprisings in Eastern Europe as well as unrest in Nicaragua, Cambodia and Mozambique. The story went that as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, he left Belfast, where he had been covering the Troubles, making off with two computers, and headed for Moscow. He launched The Moscow Times the year after the Soviet Union collapsed.

He managed to secure office space at the Pravda publishing house, which churned out thousands of copies of the Soviet behemoth every night on the presses in the basement. Our bustling office stood in stark contrast to the rest of the building, grey and disintegrating, which housed other Soviet stalwarts like Krestyanka (the Peasant Girl) and Agricultural Life, whose circulation figures were plummeting as ours started to climb.

Derk’s affable, Inspector Colombo-like exterior clearly belied an acute business sense, allowing him to establish an independent media empire in a country where doing deals was often a dangerous game. Russia in the 1990s was known as the Wild East, where mafia extorted money from new businesses and violent beatings and murders were commonplace.

I remember the time Derk came to the office to tell us he was selling a stake of the company to the Russian bank, Menatep. Attempting to allay our fears that the new part-ownership would affect our editorial integrity, Derk told us in his familiar Dutch drawl, “It’s OK, guys. I’ve met these guys. They’re family guys. It’s all going to be OK.” — a prediction that proved to be true.

The Moscow Times launched the careers of a number of young international reporters who would go on to edit national newspapers, run foreign news bureaux, win Pulitzer Prizes and write best-selling books. But for me, Derk’s greatest legacy was to forge a generation of Russian journalists who would go on to hold their rulers to account.

Alongside The Moscow Times, Derk published a Russian business daily, Kapital, which later became Vedomosti, a collaboration between the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. He hired young Russian journalists and taught them how to apply rigorous journalism standards and report without fear or favour.

Alumni from the Vedomosti stable went on to become standard-bearers for that kind of journalism, as Russia became more authoritarian and the space allowed for independent media shrank. People like Roman Shleynov, now one of Russia’s finest investigative reporters, Tatyana Lysova, who helped found the independent media outlet Meduza, and Liza Osetinskaya, founder of The Bell, learned their craft at Vedomosti. There are many more, too many to mention here.

Much later, Derk served as editorial director of the Russian business publication RBC. Under his supervision, the newspaper and Vedomosti-alumnus Osetinskaya, who was its editor, broke a taboo by publishing articles about Vladimir Putin’s daughter, a transgression that led to his exit from the board, and the replacement of most of RBC’s top editors by journalists from a state news agency.

Though Derk sold The Moscow Times, which eventually stopped publishing a paper edition, in 2005, he repurchased the online-only publication in 2017. By then, the Russian media landscape looked very different to the 1990s: all the major media outlets had been closed down, brought back under state control, or had opted to toe the Kremlin line.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the situation deteriorated further and all independent media ceased to operate in the country, with many journalists working for these outlets being declared foreign agents. Having relocated The Moscow Times to offices in Amsterdam, Derk also provided office space there to two other leading independent media organisations, Meduza and TV channel Dozhd.

For selfish reasons, I am sad that Derk has gone. My recently begun PhD tracks the rise and fall of Russia’s independent media, and Derk, naturally, would have been the first person I would have spoken to. In some ways, Derk was both the midwife of independent media inside Russia, easing it safely into the world, and its undertaker, overseeing its final days before it was erased.

After leaving The Moscow Times in 1999, Chloe Arnold reported for the BBC from the former Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, North Africa and Eastern Europe for more than 20 years. She was also Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Moscow correspondent. She is now studying for a PhD at Aberystwyth University.