Russia, ‘the Russian’ is impossible to capture in a television image, the country, the people are too versatile and complex for that. Right or wrong, attacker or liberator, winner or loser. There is a lot of gray between the black and white. You can also say that about the man who came in on Sunday evening Summer guests talked about his second homeland. Derk Sauer (69) has been living and working in Russia for 32 years, where he is the owner and publisher of, among other things: The Moscow Times. Lived and worked, because since Russia invaded Ukraine, media calling it an “invasion” or a “war” have been banned in the country. Sauer and part of his editorial team now work from Amsterdam.
In the subtitle, Derk Sauer was always referred to as a journalist and entrepreneur. And each of those “identities” led to questions from presenter Janine Abbring. At nineteen, Derk Sauer was in Ireland, not to study as his parents thought, but to closely follow the struggle between Catholics and Protestants there. The film Belfast takes him back to those years. He learned there that the ‘good guys’ sometimes kill each other more gruesomely than the enemy. The good ones were the workers and Sauer came to support their Catholic emancipation movement. Just how ‘independent journalism’ and neutral was he sitting there, Abbring asked. He insisted that he wanted to be a “revolutionary with a pen.” But the answer to the question of where he was actually going with a car full of weapons, that didn’t come.
His second identity, that of an entrepreneur, was discussed after an excerpt from Citizen K. In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had fallen apart. It’s chaos, and clever people know how to make money out of that chaos. Mikhail Khodorkovsky made his fortune importing computers from the West. He then got into the oil business and became one of the richest oligarchs. Abbring asks what the definition of oligarch is and whether Derk Sauer is not one himself. He was blown away, he said, when he set up a “media company” in Moscow at precisely that time. When that became successful, he made that same Mikhail Khodorkovsky a shareholder because he could protect him from the Russian mafia. Here it appears that the ‘wild time’ that Sauer experienced in Russia can hardly be imagined for Dutch ears and eyes.
Not that he doesn’t do his best to show as many sides of Russia and the Russians as possible. The recklessness with which the frozen Lake Baikal is used as a highway, even after it thaws for a long time. But we can’t put into words what we’re in watercolors see it happen – car crashes into a hole, two men struggle between the ice floes, a dead man bobs under the ice. Nature is “overwhelming”, people are “fatalistic”, and there is only a Russian word for longing for that land that is much stronger than homesickness. The feeling creeps “into the bones and the blood” and it was sparked in him by looking at Garage people, in which we see Russians working out, musing, laughing, singing and toasting to life in their garages. “So Russian.”
Contradiction is the word of Sauer’s television night. The enterprising journalist (or journalistic entrepreneur) showed that the bad can lead to good results; like in Over the Limit, in which a young gymnast is manipulated to great success by female coaches. That you can feel sorry for former president Boris Yeltsin in Putin’s Witnesses. He helped Putin in the saddle, but didn’t even get a thank you from him. The soft side of an aggressor, that’s how this episode of Zomergasten started. In The Occupant we see images from the telephone of a Russian prisoner of war. Birthday present for his daughter – a pink bicycle. family party. Crazy evening with mates. Uniform on. Airplane. War.