Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, was arrested on Saturday, August 24, by French police as part of an investigation into the lack of moderation on his platform. Although he spent part of his childhood in Italy, Durov epitomizes the success of tech entrepreneurs in Saint Petersburg, where he was born in 1984. Here, in 2006, in a city home to a large community of start-ups and researchers, he and his brother founded VKontakte, a social media site largely inspired by Facebook. It went on to become a huge success in Russia and the Russian-speaking world.
Beyond his economic success in Russia in the early 2010s, Durov is above all the Robin Hood of the internet who, in a country with an authoritarian regime, has dared to place the defense of individual freedoms above all else. So, in 2013, still in the company of his brother Nikolai, he launched the Telegram messaging service. Thwarting the authorities' appetite for control, his aim was to defend the individual's right to privacy and guarantee freedom to exchange messages without being read. Libertarian rather than rebellious, nevertheless, in 2018 Telegram refused to hand over codes to the Russian secret services to enable them to read user messages. The Russian State then spent tens of millions of rubles on technical measures to try and block the application, rocking the Russian internet for several weeks. Hundreds of sites actually stopped working, due to IP address blockages. But the messaging service held firm.
In France, Telegram already found itself in the dock after the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris. Terrorists were said to have communicated on the messaging service, ahead of the attacks and with impunity. After these French criticisms – like those in Russia, also a target of attacks – and while Durov is accused of having known for a long time that IS jihadists were passing through his messaging service, he has defended himself in a joking tone, proposing to "ban words." In Russian web circles, many also share his irony: "If there's a stabbing, is the knife the culprit?"
Long dubbed the "Mark Zuckerberg of the Russian web," he is the enfant terrible of the bubble of freedom that managed to take flight far from the Kremlin and its restrictive laws. In Moscow, he has maintained an image of a rebel outside the system, refusing to associate his image with that of Mother Russia, cultivating a global vision and projects. So much so that in 2014, he got into a tug-of-war with the authorities over the fate of VKontakte, deemed too unruly. With some 100 million users in Russia and the former Soviet republics, in the eyes of the Kremlin the social network played a crucial role in the pro-European revolution in Kyiv. The FSB (one of the KGB's heirs) demanded that Durov allow retrieval of the data of leaders who had used it to mobilize crowds. Durov replied, "Niet." ["No" in Russian.]
Eventually, VKontakte was taken over by friends of the Kremlin in exchange for a large sum of money (estimated at between $50 and $100 million), and its young boss, 31, was forced to leave Russia. "Unfortunately, the situation [in Russia] is incompatible with internet business at the moment," he declared at the time, forced to relinquish management of VKontakte after already having had to relinquish financial control. "I publicly refused to cooperate with the authorities. They can't stand me," he bravely confided just before his departure.
Since 2014, he has officially been living in exile and set up Telegram's headquarters in Dubai, where he most often resides. In the early years, however, he regularly returned to Saint Petersburg to see his family. Few, however, came across "Pasha" (his nickname) in his hometown, where he founded VKontakte straight out of university – he had indeed fallen out with many there. In 2012, Durov threw 5,000 ruble banknotes (about €120 at the time) folded into the shape of small airplanes out of his office window, and amused himself by watching passers-by.
Despite his energy, "Pasha" nevertheless comes across as a complicated introvert. Handsome, a standard-bearer – and even a muscular sex symbol – for Russian youth, he poses shirtless on an Instagram account that could be that of an actor or influencer. But at the same time, we know few friends of the entrepreneur, a man who usually dresses himself in black for his rare appearances. His motto: in the face of government, defend the right of ordinary people to freely use the internet. "If criticizing the government is illegal in some country, Telegram won't be a part of such politically motivated censorship," he has said regularly. Legal proceedings opened in France, however, do not concern criticism of the government, but otherwise serious matters: the dissemination of child pornography images and the use of the Telegram platform by organized crime groups.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.