who is Nikolay Durov

On August 25, Pavel Durov, the creator of VK and Telegram, was detained in Paris. And on August 28, it turned out that his elder brother, Nikolai, was also wanted. According to data According to Politico, arrest warrants for both brothers were issued in late March, after Telegram repeatedly refused to cooperate with French and European authorities.

Nikolay Durov is not at all like his younger brother. He is not a public figure and fundamental scientist. Nevertheless, he played a huge role in the creation of both VK and Telegram. We tell you about his contribution to Russian mathematics and the Russian Internet.

Who is Nikolay Durov

Nikolay Durov was born in 1980, four years older than Pavel. The father of the family, Valery Semenovich Durov, was a renowned philologist who specialized in ancient Rome, and since 1992 he has been the head of the Department of Classical Philology at the Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg State University.

For several years at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, the Durov family lived in Italy – the father of the family worked at the University of Turin. But in 1992 they returned to Russia, as Valery was offered the position of head of department.

Both boys were fascinated with technology from childhood. Nikolai spent his entire youth enthusiastically studying mathematics in a circle at the elite Physics and Mathematics Lyceum No. 239 – Grigory Perelman came from the same circle system. Young Kolya is described as a typical nerd – terribly fascinated by mathematics, but having difficulty solving simple everyday and social problems. However, he grew up surrounded by people like him – so most likely he felt quite comfortable there.

In 1996-1998, Nikolay won the gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad three times in a row, representing Russia. In 1998, he entered the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics at St. Petersburg State University.

Already in his second year, a team of programmers with Durov’s participation won the prestigious international programming competition of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Scientific activity

In 2005, Durov defended his dissertation at St. Petersburg State University on the topic: “A New Approach to Arakelov Geometry”. He then continued his scientific work at the University of Bonn (Germany), where in 2007 he defended his second dissertation on the topic of “Arakelov Singular Geometry”.

Arakelov geometry is a branch of mathematics that combines ideas from classical geometry and number theory. It depicts an abstract mathematical system in which both continuous (geometric) elements and discrete (numerical) elements exist.

This is a theoretical area that is used mainly in complex problems in number theory. However, it also has a relation to cryptography, which later interested Nikolay in a completely practical practical plane.

There are quite a few scientific works by Durov on the website Math-net five scientific articles and four lecture notes can be found. Chronologically, the first article is from 2004, and the last one is from 2018. Perhaps there are so few of them because already in 2006 or 2007 he became closely involved in his younger brother's commercial projects, moving fundamental science into the realm of hobby.

From VK to Telegram

Nikolai's role in the creation of Vkontakte was clearly great, but his functions in the company are not very transparent. Thus, both brothers they claimthat the code for Vkontakte and the design of the site were entirely created by Pavel, and Nikolai joined him only a year and a half after the launch (that is, in 2008), when it was necessary to create specialized data storage systems for it.

However, according to Anton Rosenberg, already in 2007, the elder Durov was its technical director and invited him to become his deputy. Together, they did almost all the technical work – “administration of all equipment, setting up new servers, load balancing and recovery after accidents, protection from DDoS attacks and even fixing PHP code, and sometimes developing new services.”

A similar picture, in which the elder Durov has been responsible for most technical issues since the very beginning of VKontakte’s existence, is painted in the book “The Durov Code” by journalist Nikolai Kononov.

Nikolai was also an active user of the social network – his avatar was a portrait of the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno.

Until 2013, Nikolai Durov remained the technical director of VKontakte, but what exactly he did is not very clear. Against the backdrop of Pavel's conflicts with investors and shareholders and the Russian authorities, the name of the older brother almost completely disappears from the company's annals.

A year later, the brothers completely lost control of the social network. Pavel Durov demonstratively broke with Russia and received citizenship of the island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. According to Rosenberg, only by this time Nikolai moved out from his mother and into his own apartment.

At the same time, Nikolai was engaged in scientific activities – in any case, in 2011 he published a scientific article as an employee of the St. Petersburg branch of the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (POMI RAS). It is known that he received a salary from POMI in 2017 and 2021.

In 2013, Nikolai developed his own encryption protocol MTProtowhich formed the basis of the Durovs' new project, Telegram. Pavel Durov said that the protocol was initially created for secure communication between two brothers.

The idea came to the brothers in 2011, when, against the backdrop of mass protests in Russia, Pavel’s home was searched – but he simply had no better way to tell his brother about it than via SMS.

Nikolay became the technical director of the new project. It is his name that is associated with the main internal scandal of the early Telegram. In 2017, Anton Rosenberg, Nikolay’s childhood friend, with whom he studied mathematics in a circle, was fired from the company. Rosenberg released a long textin which he stated that he was fired because Nikolai Durov fell in love with his girlfriend and future wife.

In addition, Rosenberg exposed many secrets of Telegram's inner workings. Among other things, he claimed that during the conflict, his chat history disappeared – and returned the next day. In his opinion, Nikolai Durov deleted the messages – he is listed as the author of the text engine that allowed this to be done.

Rosenberg portrays the grown-up Nikolai as an extremely strange person – a domestic invalid, extremely dependent on his mother, who managed his money and even took part in VKontakte, monitoring the site's viewing charts.

If we are to believe Rosenberg's version, Kolya's nerd childhood oddities did not disappear in adulthood, but on the contrary, became even stronger.

“At the SPbSU Forum, he had the nickname KOT, which later turned into the nickname Kot, which eventually replaced his name. Moreover, Kolya actually considers himself a cat, calls his mother “Big Cat”, loves to meow on the street and in restaurants and encourages others to do the same…

I don't know where it came from, I didn't have anything like that when I was a kid, what does the abbreviation K.O.T. mean? I asked him several times, but he always evaded the answer. According to one version, the death of their cat Morpheus (Morpheus) had an effect, at least, the questions to the ceiling: “Where is our Morfeyushka?..” – during negotiations led people unfamiliar with him into great confusion”

Pavel Durov denied firing Rosenberg and hinted that he suffers from a mental illness.

The TON Adventure: Nikolai Durov's Failed Cryptoverse

One of Nikolay Durov's scientific interests is cryptography. And Pavel considered himself a libertarian and opposed centralized control (however, the brothers' political views have always been similar). Therefore, neither could stand aside from blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

In 2018, Telegram introduced a new, extremely ambitious and large-scale project – the TON (Telegram Open Network) cryptocurrency universe.

It is a decentralized network where users exchange messages and Gram cryptocurrency, make purchases, enter into smart contracts, bypass blocking using proxies, and create and use applications.

The Gram rate was supposed to be controlled by a kind of Central Bank made up of investors, who could sell and buy tokens, balancing supply and demand.

It is unclear how much of this concept belongs to Pavel and how much to Nikolay. However, all official documentation on TON signed name of the elder brother.

The project inspired many — even Roman Abramovich was among the investors of TON. However, in 2019, the US Securities and Exchange Commission banned the sale of Gram. Based on the nature of the ICO, which only large investors were allowed to participate in, the regulator came to the conclusion that it was not a cryptocurrency, but a security. After that, TON separated from Telegram, it is being developed by an independent community of developers.

After this story, the already rare mentions of Nikolai Durov in public sources disappear. He is still listed as a research fellow at POMI RAS, at least as indicated on the website.

It is unclear where he lives. Friends of Nikolai Durov told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he no longer lives in St. Petersburg, but moved first to Finland and then to Dubai. The publication claims that Nikolai decided to temporarily cut off contact with the outside world, and attributes this to the fact that operational communications in the SVO are maintained on Telegram. However, Kommersant claims the opposite – Nikolay lives in St. Petersburg. And also it turned outthat he has a passport from St. Kitts and Nevis.

All we can do is wish Nikolai good luck – despite all his shortcomings and mistakes, it is difficult to find an IT specialist who has done more for the Russian Internet than he has.