“Nikolai is absolutely in space. In addition to mathematics, he is interested in politics - in his optics. "

Politico claims that France pursues not only Pavel Durov, but also his brother Nikolai. We tell you what is known about him

The French authorities issued the arrest warrant not only by the head of Telegram Pavel Durov, but also by his older brother Nikolai, Politico reported on August 28. From the documents to which it referred, it follows that both orders were issued back in March as part of the case, on which Pavel Durov was detained in Paris. The Durov brothers worked together on the creation of VKontakte, and then Telegram. Unlike his younger brother, Nikolai Durov was never a public person, there is not enough information about him in open sources, there is not even a page in Wikipedia in Russian. He gives the media comments extremely rarely. Here is the little that is known about him.

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Nikolai Durov was born on November 21, 1980 in Leningrad, he is four years older than his brother Paul. Durov's parents taught at the university. Father Valery Semenovich, a specialist in the history and literature of Ancient Rome, worked at the University of Turin. In an interview with Takera Karlson, Pavel Durov, in particular, said that his brother Nikolai was shown on Italian television "as a child prodigy that was able to solve cubic equations in real time at the age of 10 years."

“By the age of three, the elder brother of Paul, Nikolai, read as an adult, and in eight decided cubic equations. It was under his leadership that Durov Jr. began to program when he was 10 years old, ”Wired wrote two years ago in an article about Pavel Durov.

In the early 1990s, the Durov family returned to Russia-Valery Durov accepted the invitation to head the department of the classical philology of the philological faculty of St. Petersburg State University (he led it until 2013).

Nikolai Durov in the high school of the school, which he graduated in Russia, writes Kommersant, won the international mathematical Olympics three times (in 1996, 1997 and 1998), he repeatedly became a winner of the International Olympiad in Informatics. “My brother became the world champion in mathematics, won the international olympiads in mathematics and programming, and did it many times in a row. He was the best, ”said Pavel Durov in an interview with Takera Carlson.

In 2000, the team of signs of the Mathematical and Mechanical Faculty of St. Petersburg State University, which included Nikolai Durov, Andrei Lopatin and Oleg Etervsky, won the ICPC pre-programming championship. Durov and his comrades were the first representatives of Russia to have succeeded.

In the article by Forbes, published in March 2015, Roman Elizarov, he held in the late 1990s tournaments for schoolchildren, recalled that Durov, Lopatin and Eterevsky first attracted attention as programmers, being high school students of the Physics and Mathematics Lyceum. “They hacked the network of the organizers of the programming Olympiad and, in order to boast, began to send messages to all participants. We disqualified the team, ”said Elizarov. “Then we apologized for a long time. There were young ones. But it was a challenge - they said that they closed all the holes, ”Lopatin recalled.

Durov, said in an interview with Forbes, Natalia Voyakovskaya, who trained a team of programmers, was her unconditional leader. “It was somehow immediately felt. He, of course, is all in himself. But if you talk, what is not easy, you get a lot of pleasure. Kolya Durov’s intelligence is a powerful thing, ”said Voyakovskaya.

In 2005, Durov defended his thesis at St. Petersburg State University on the topic: "A new approach to Arakelov's geometry." Then he continued his scientific activity at the University of Bonn, where in 2007 he defended the second dissertation on the topic "Singular geometry of Arakelov." “My brother has two doctoral degrees in mathematics, he is very smart,” Pavel Durov said in an interview with Carlson.

Since 2006, Nikolai Durov helped his brother to create a social network VKontakte, and was the technical director of the project. According to one of the widespread versions, it was Nikolai Durov who played a key role in the development of this social network, but he himself, commenting on VC.ru in 2015 in 2015, called such statements “myth”.

According to Nikolai Durov, he "at the initial stage of the development of the project except that he helped with general councils and was a kind of first system administrator of the company." Only a year and a half after the launch of the social network, Nikolai Durov said, “it was necessary to develop specialized data storage systems, in addition to standard tools like MySQL and the PHP code written by Pavel and other PHP developers, and then we connected with Andrei Lopatin ".

Nikolai Durov emphasized that it was his younger brother that “wrote and launched the first version of VKontakte, and also single -handedly developed and supported it for about a year.” In the future, he said, it was Pavel Durov who “led web development and web design, and also made all the fundamental decisions on the direction of development of the project.”

In 2014, Pavel Durov sold his share on VKontakte after a conflict with other shareholders, including the largest of them at that time - the United Capital Partners (UCP). The Durov brothers and a number of key employees left the company and focused on the Telegram messenger. Work on this project was started a few years before the Durovye departure from VK, the development of Telegram was called one of the causes of the conflict of shareholders.

Andrei Lopatin began to help Nikolai Durov with work on the MTPROTO protocol in 2012, he said Wared himself. It is MTPROTO that underlies Telegram. When the messenger launched, Pavel Durov asked Lopatin to become the general director of the legal entity, which controlled the messenger. But in the end, Lopatin was fired from the company, and he did not leave the rest of the team from Russia - but remained in St. Petersburg, "focusing on teaching."

For Telegram, Nikolai Durov developed the basic principles of encryption. “My brother, as a genius, was able to create the encryption standard, which we use to this day, with small changes,” said Pavel Durov Tucker Carlson, once again telling that the idea of ​​a protected messenger came to him when they tried to break into his house "Armed police officers, as I refused to block opposition groups." In 2011, during the protests against the results of the State Duma elections, the VK was demanded to close the opposition groups, and in 2014 to provide personal data of users who organized protest groups during Euromaidan. Both times, as Pavel Durov emphasized, he refused. Pavel Durov himself, according to him, "was more engaged in the user interface, how the application works, its functions, etc., and [brother Nikolai] was responsible for encryption."

In September 2017, the former top manager of VKontakte and Telegram Anton Rosenberg publicly spoke about the conflict between him and the Durov brothers, who, according to him, occurred due to the fact that Nikolai was in love with his future wife. Rosenberg said that due to his personal conflict he was fired under the pretext of “absenteeism”, and LLC Telegraph, which he called Telegram, filed a lawsuit against him. Rosenberg responded with a oncoming appeal to the court. Pavel Durov said that the information distributed by Rosenberg is not true, adding that "he heard from his family that a person suffers from mental illness." Nikolai Durov did not publicly comment on anything. The parties eventually concluded a settlement agreement. Rosenberg received compensation of 1.7 million rubles, and the record in his work book was corrected on "dismissed of his own free will."

The main development and headquarters of Telegram are in the UAE. Pavel Durov also lives in this country, who, in addition to Russian citizenship, has the citizenship of the UAE, as well as the island state of St. Kits and Nevis. Nikolai Durov, according to open sources and information from merged databases, also in addition to Russian there is citizenship of St. Kits and Nevis, and, in addition, Latvia. The Office for Citizenship and Migration of Latvia in response to a request from Medusa reported that in accordance with the laws of the country it did not disclose such information.

In 2018, the Ton blockchain project was launched, in the creation of which Nikolai Durov took part with his brother.

Nikolai Durov at least a few years after leaving the VK lived in Russia and was engaged in scientific activities (Pavel Durov, as it turned out, in recent years he traveled to Russia dozens of times).

On the website of the St. Petersburg branch of the Mathematical Institute. V.A. Steklov, Russian Academy of Sciences (MAKE RAS), Nikolai Durov appears as a senior researcher at the Laboratory of Algebra and the theory of numbers. According to Russians merged into open access to the databases, in addition to the wounds, Nikolai Durov received a salary at least in 2017 and 2021. Also in 2021, he received a salary at the Raiffeisen Capital Management Company LLC.

In 2022 - shortly after the beginning of the full -scale invasion of the Russian troops to Ukraine - the personal page of Nikolai Durov disappeared from the site in addition to the wounds, and after it became known about the issued warrant for his arrest, information about the scientist, judging by the Yandex Cache, was Removed from the website of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The source of Medusa, who previously worked with Durov, said that "Nikolai is absolutely in space, such a" rain man "." However, “in addition to mathematics, he is interested in politics, only in his optics,” adding that Nikolai Durov adheres to “ultra liberal views”, and his favorite publications during the period when they spoke, there were “Medusa” and “rain”.

Since 2013, a photograph of the Ukrainian anarchist and revolutionary Nestor Makhno has been on the Avatar Durov in VKontakte. His last post on the page in this social network is a congratulation on the day of the spring equinox in March 2018.

It was not possible to quickly contact Nikolai Durov’s “Medusa”: an answering machine is triggered on his phone. Telegram Vice President Ilya Perekop and the company's press service did not respond to the request of Medusa to comment on the arrest issued by France and clarify to which Nikolai Durov was now involved in the work of the messenger.

Updated: in the previous version of this material it was reported that Andrei Lopatin did not work on Telegram. This is wrong. Corresponding changes were made to the material. The editors apologize to Andrei Lopatin.