Pavel Durov

The founder of VKontakte and Telegram

Pavel Durov was born in Leningrad, today's Saint Petersburg, on 10 October 1984 [1]. In 2006 he founded the social network VKontakte with his elder brother Nikolai; in 2013 the two created Telegram, whose MTProto encryption protocol Nikolai designed [2][5]. In 2014 he left VK and Russia; he lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based [5].

Childhood in Turin

According to Torino Cronaca, the family settled in Turin in 1988, when Pavel was four, because his father, the Latinist Valery Durov, had moved from Saint Petersburg to teach classical philology at the University of Turin [8]; Il Resto del Carlino also writes that the father came to Turin to teach [5]. Durov himself says that his father taught classical philology there and that he lived in the city from the age of four to eight [4]. A biography published in 2023 on the Teletype platform says instead that the father had been offered a post teaching Russian to foreigners [11]. The family lived in via Vanchiglia and also frequented the Italy–USSR association, then based at via Lagrange 7 [8].

According to Torino Cronaca, Pavel and Nikolai went to primary school at the Falletti di Barolo school in via Cassini [8]: the Giulia Falletti di Barolo school, built in 1960 at number 98, in the Crocetta district, to cope with the growing number of local pupils [9]. The Teletype biography calls it the Coppino – Falletti di Barolo primary school and dates his school years to 1990–1992 [11]; ForkLog dates his Turin primary school to 1990 [2].

"When I first went to school in Italy, I didn't know how to speak Italian. I didn't know a single Italian word," Durov recalled in 2024; many teachers said the boy would not make it. "By the end of the first year, I was second best," and by the end of the second year he was the best: the experience, he adds, showed him that one can excel and one can compete [3].

He says he keeps fond memories of his years in Turin: an especially kind teacher from Calabria, the nicknames "little communist" and "Soviet kid" with which others teased him, and above all very friendly people; in 2025 he said that hearing Italian still warms his heart and takes him back to his school years in Turin [4]. In a 2015 interview he had already said: "My father taught philology there. I have fond memories of Italy. Turin is beautiful" [10].

Durov traces to his Italian years his first direct comparison between the Soviet and the Western systems, a comparison the former lost in his view [3]. In that period his brother Nikolai, then about ten, appeared live on Italian television as a child prodigy who could solve cubic equations in real time, something that in Italy, Durov says, was thought impossible at the time [3].

The computer brought from Turin

The family returned to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the father was offered the chance to head a department at Saint Petersburg State University [3]. From Italy the brothers brought back an IBM PC/XT, and it was on that machine that they learned to program; Durov recalls that theirs was one of the few families in Russia where the children could really teach themselves programming [3]. These are the same two brothers who some fifteen years later would build VKontakte and then Telegram [2].

Sources disagree on the date of the return. Several Italian outlets, two of them from Turin, place the family's final return to Saint Petersburg in 2001, when Pavel was seventeen [1][5][8][10], and Open, citing La Stampa, writes that Durov lived in Turin for fourteen years [12]. Durov instead links the return to the collapse of the Soviet Union and recalls going on to an experimental school in Russia with six foreign languages [3].

Turin and the closure of "Basta Dittatura"

On the night of 28 September 2021 Telegram closed the Italian channel "Basta Dittatura" ("Enough Dictatorship"), which campaigned against the COVID-19 green pass, on the grounds that it incited violence against doctors carrying out vaccinations [6]. In the preceding weeks the Turin Public Prosecutor's Office had issued a seizure order in an investigation into the unlawful processing and dissemination of personal data [7]. Commenting on the closure in his channel's chat, Durov wrote that the Turin prosecutor's office had also stepped in, in "the city where I went to kindergarten and primary school" [6].

Sources

  1. Pavel Durov compie 40 anni: la storia del fondatore di Telegram — Sky TG24, 10 October 2024
  2. Chi è Pavel Durov? Telegram, TON e il percorso del magnate tecnologico russo in esilio — ForkLog, 6 November 2024
  3. Il creatore di Telegram su Elon Musk, la resistenza agli attacchi dell'FBI e l'aggressione subita in California (intervista) — Tucker Carlson (YouTube), 16 April 2024
  4. L'intervista di Pavel Durov alla rivista Le Point in traduzione russa — Kod.ru, 19 June 2025
  5. Pavel Durov, chi è il fondatore di Telegram che ha oscurato i no vax — Il Resto del Carlino, 28 September 2021
  6. Telegram oscura Basta dittatura, la chat dei No vax. «Minacciavano i medici» — Il Resto del Carlino, 28 September 2021
  7. L'improbabile guerra dei giudici contro i canali «no Green Pass» su Telegram — L'Indipendente, 10 September 2021
  8. Mosca chiede l'arresto di Pavel Durov (Telegram) per terrorismo. I segreti dell'infanzia a Torino — Torino Cronaca, 29 July 2026
  9. Scuola elementare Giulia Falletti di Barolo — MuseoTorino
  10. Pavel Durov, il fondatore di Telegram, è cresciuto a Torino — Quotidiano Piemontese, 28 January 2016
  11. L'infanzia di Pavel Durov — Teletype (zanoza_media), 9 September 2023
  12. Chi è davvero il fondatore di Telegram Pavel Durov: «Arresto? Forse si è consegnato» — Open, 26 August 2024

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