Pavel Durov, who was 22 years old at the time, founded Vkontakte in 2006. Its meteoric rise, fueled by a desire for a domestic alternative to Facebook, earned Durov the moniker “Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg.” However, Durov was forced out of his CEO position in 2014 following disputed allegations of a hit-and-run incident involving a police officer and an attempted hostile takeover in which an investment fund controlled by Ilya Sherbovich, a Russian businessman and Putin ally, secretly acquired 48 percent of the company.
Durov laid the responsibility completely on the Russian authorities for his removal. “I’m afraid there is no coming back [to VK], not after I publicly refused to cooperate with the police,” he told TechCrunch at the time. They despise me.”
Following his expulsion from Russia, the entrepreneur shifted his focus to a new venture: the encrypted messaging service Telegram, which he created in 2013. Telegram has always advocated for a more robust approach to privacy and free expression, owing to Durov’s experience with repression in Russia.
Durov initially refused requests from French authorities and later pressure from Russia’s FSB security service to include a “back door” in the encryption that would allow countries to intercept encrypted messages. Russian telecommunications firms were ordered to restrict Telegram within the country, but they mostly succeeded. The Russian government finally abandoned it in 2020, by which time it had already been adopted as an official channel of communication for a number of government agencies. It has been similarly adopted in neighbouring Ukraine as a tool for both personal and professional interactions.
