Pavel Durov

Pavel Durov and Mike Butcher at the TechCrunch conference in San Francisco, 2015

Pavel Durov's grandfather Semyon Petrovich Tulyakov fought in World War II. He served in the 65th Infantry Regiment, participated in the battles on the Leningrad front at Krasnoborsky, Gatchinsky, and elsewhere, and was wounded three times, receiving the Order of the Red Star,[16] the Order of the Patriotic War 2nd degree,[17] and on the 40th Victory Day, the Order of the Great Patriotic War level I.[18] After the war, he was arrested.[19]

Durov's father Valery Semenovich Durov is a Doctor of Philological Sciences and the author of many academic papers. Since 1992, he has been head of the Department of classical philology of the philological faculty of Saint Petersburg State University.[20] In March 2022, Durov wrote that "On my Mom's side, I trace my family line from Kyiv. Her maiden name is Ukrainian (Ivanenko), and to this day we have many relatives living in Ukraine."[21]

Pavel Durov and Alexander Plyushchev at the “Runet Prize 2010” award ceremony

In 2006, Durov started VKontakte with Ilya Perekopsky,[22] later known as VK, which was initially influenced by Facebook.[23] When he and his brother Nikolai built up the VKontakte website, the company grew to a value of $3 billion.[11]

In 2011, he was involved in a standoff with the police in Saint Petersburg when the government demanded the removal of opposition politicians' pages after the 2011 election to the Duma; Durov posted a picture of a dog with his tongue out wearing a hoodie and the police left after an hour when he did not answer the door.[15][23]

In 2012, Durov publicly posted a picture of himself extending his middle finger and calling it his official response to Mail.ru Group's efforts to buy VK.[15] In December 2013, Durov decided to sell his 12% to Ivan Tavrin (at that time 40% of the shares belonged to Mail.ru Group, and 48% to the United Capital Partners). Later, Tavrin resold these shares to Mail.ru Group.[24][11][25][26]

On 1 April 2014, Durov submitted his resignation to the board; at first, due to the fact the company confirmed he had resigned, it was believed to be related to the Russo-Ukrainian War which had started in February.[27] However, Durov himself claimed it was an April Fool's Joke on 3 April 2014.[28][29]

On 16 April 2014, Durov publicly refused to hand over the personal data of Ukrainian protesters to Russia's security agencies and to block Alexei Navalny's page on VK.[9] Instead, he posted the relevant orders on his own VK page,[30][31] claiming that the requests were unlawful.

Pavel Durov and Arkady Volozh at the Yandex Data Factory conference, March 2, 2015

On 21 April 2014, Durov was dismissed as CEO of VK. The company claimed it was acting on his letter of resignation a month earlier that he failed to recall.[9][32] Durov then claimed the company had been effectively taken over by Vladimir Putin's allies,[32][33] suggesting his ouster was the result of both his refusal to hand over personal details of users to federal law enforcement and his refusal to hand over the personal details of people who were members of a VK group dedicated to the Euromaidan protest movement.[32][33] Durov then left Russia and stated that he had "no plans to go back"[33] and that "the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment".[9]

Upon leaving Russia, he obtained Saint Kitts and Nevis citizenship by donating $250,000 to the country's Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation and secured $300 million in cash within Swiss banks. This allowed him to focus on creating his next company, Telegram, focused on an encrypted messaging service of the same name. Telegram was headquartered in Berlin and later moved to Dubai.[11] In January 2018 Durov announced that, in a bid to monetize the growing success of Telegram, he was launching the "Gram" cryptocurrency and the TON platform.[34] It raised a total of $1.7 billion from investors.[35] However, these ventures were halted by American regulator SEC which argued in court that Grams bypassed U.S. financing laws and should return the money to investors.[36]

Pavel Durov at the TechCrunch conference in Berlin, 2013

In 2018, Russia attempted to block Telegram, after the company refused to cooperate with Russian security services. A leaked letter by an FSB employee stated that the block was actually tied to the company's intention to launch the Telegram Open Network.[37] During the attempted block period, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs continued to operate official channels on the app. The block order was lifted in 2020, after two years of block attempts, which the service reportedly evaded using domain fronting. The stated reason was Telegram agreeing to "counter terrorism and extremism" on the platform.[38][39][40][41]