Pavel Durov — tech (telegram) with roots in the USSR
Pavel Valeryevich Durov was born in Leningrad on 10 October 1984 into an academic family; his father is Valery Durov. He and his elder brother, Nikolai, a mathematician and programmer, spent most of their childhood in Turin, Italy, where their father worked, before the family returned to Russia as the Soviet Union came to an end. From 2002 to 2006 he studied English and translation in the philology faculty of St Petersburg State University.
In 2006, with a former classmate, he launched the social network VKontakte ('In Contact'), which opened for beta testing in September of that year and, with Nikolai's technical work, quickly became the largest social network in Russia and the Russian-speaking world; he became known as 'Russia's Zuckerberg'. In 2013 the brothers founded Telegram, a messaging app. In April 2014, after a public dispute over requests from the Russian authorities for user data of protesters and over the network's ownership, he left VKontakte, sold his shares and left Russia.
Telegram was afterwards based in Dubai, a choice he has explained by the city's business climate and its suitability for a neutral platform, and Durov acquired citizenship of Saint Kitts and Nevis in 2013, and of the United Arab Emirates and France in 2021. Telegram was blocked in Russia from 2018, after he declined to provide its encryption keys, until the ban was lifted in 2020 or 2021 by different accounts, and has since grown to more than a billion monthly active users. Forbes counts him among the world's billionaires. By his own account, his French passport renders his name as Paul du Rove.
On 24 August 2024 he was arrested at Le Bourget airport near Paris in an investigation into the alleged use of Telegram for criminal activity and its alleged failure to cooperate with the authorities; after four days he was placed under formal investigation and released on bail of five million euros, and in July 2026 he returned to Paris for a fourth round of questioning by the investigating judges. In 2026 Russia's Federal Security Service opened criminal proceedings against him, accusing him of aiding terrorist activity, and placed him on its wanted list.
"Spent most of his childhood in Turin, Italy; left Russia in 2014; citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis (2013), the UAE and France (2021); based in Dubai."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Leningrad (now St Petersburg, Russia)
Born in Leningrad in 1984 into an academic family, he spent much of his childhood in Turin, studied philology at St Petersburg State University and founded VKontakte there in 2006, before leaving Russia in 2014.
Leningrad (now St Petersburg, Russia). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.