From Zuckerberg of Russia to wanted man, the journey of Pavel Durov

By Paul Mozur & Adam Satariano

More than a decade ago, when Russia pushed Pavel Durov to shut down the pages of opposition politicians on a Facebook-like site he had created, the tech entrepreneur responded online by posting a cheeky picture of a hoodie-wearing dog with its tongue out.

“Official response to the intelligence services to the request to block groups,” he wrote unapologetically.

Thirteen years later, Durov’s anti-establishment streak appears to have gotten him into a fresh round of trouble with the authorities. On Saturday, he was arrested in France as part of an investigation into criminal activity on Telegram, the online communications tool he founded in 2013, which had grown into a global platform defined by its hands-off approach to policing how users behaved.

In college in St Petersburg, a friend showed Durov an early version of Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg. Inspired, he set out to make his own version. Vkontakte, a service he started in 2006, dominated Russia within a few years. It also attracted notice from the Kremlin, which demanded information about Vkontakte’s users.

Durov said he had begun building Telegram to be a more secure way to communicate after Russian security forces showed up at his apartment around 2011. He was still running Vkontakte while building Telegram when the government gave him an ultimatum: Hand over data about Vkontakte’s users or lose control of the company and be forced to leave the country.

“I chose the latter,” Durov said.

Secrecy trumps the closer policing of online speech, he has said. “Privacy, ultimately, is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” he posted in 2015. “To be truly free, you should be ready to risk everything for freedom,” Durov wrote on Instagram in 2018.

On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron of France referred to Durov’s arrest and said that the country was “deeply committed to freedom of expression” but that “in a state governed by the rule of law, freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life.”

Durov’s arrest has caused a firestorm, turning him into a folk hero among those concerned about free speech and government censorship, especially as scrutiny of online content has increased globally.

Elon Musk, the owner of X, and Edward Snowden, the American intelligence contractor who fled to Russia after disclosing classified information, were among those who raced to Durov’s defense.

Telegram said in a statement on Sunday that it abides by European Union laws. “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” the company said.

Telegram has long been underpinned by Durov’s anti-authority ethos and commitment to free speech.

That guiding maxim helped Telegram become a popular chat app for Russians, Iranians and others living under authoritarian governments. But Durov’s laissez-faire approach to policing the platform has also attracted terrorists, extremists, gun runners, scammers, and drug dealers.

In 2014, he left Russia amid growing scrutiny from its security services and eventually decamped to Dubai, where he said the government would not interfere with his business. Since then, he has fought with Apple and major governments over content controls. Telegram has faced temporary or permanent bans in 31 countries, according to Surfshark, a maker of VPN software used to avoid internet blocks.

On his personal social media accounts, Durov’s posts showcase an eclectic lifestyle. In one recent post, he claimed he had fathered more than 100 biological children in 12 countries as a sperm donor over the past 15 years. He said he was sharing the information to help destigmatise the topic, adding that he first donated sperm to help a friend struggling with infertility and he planned to “open source” his DNA.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson that aired in April, Mr. Durov accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of trying to hire a Telegram programmer so the U.S. government could gain access to user data. During the interview, one of his first in years, he sat in front of a bookcase that held two sculptures of chairs, one covered in knives and the other with phalluses — an apparent allusion to a Russian prison joke.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Born in 1984 in the Soviet Union, Durov moved with his family when he was 4 to northern Italy. His brother, Nikolai, a math whiz who became Telegram’s chief technology officer, was featured on Italian television solving cubic equations. In the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, the Durovs returned to St. Petersburg, where Pavel and Nikolai participated in youth math competitions and coded on an IBM computer the family had brought back from Italy.

©2024 The New York Times News Service