This genius cat-lover helped Pavel Durov turbocharge Telegram

Since his arrest in France, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has become the poster child in the debate over whether tech platforms should be allowed to put individual privacy over collective safety.
But if it were up to the French authorities, Pavel’s older brother Nikolai belongs on the wanted poster too.
Nikolai, who did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment for this story, has long held a vital role at Telegram, the social media and encrypted messaging platform founded by his younger brother.
He has been labeled as Telegram’s real brain — to some even the éminence grise — behind the app’s main selling point to its nearly 1 billion users: privacy from prying eyes, including those of governments.
While Pavel was the muscular, jet-setting face of the operation, a Russian tech prince flirting with the limelight, Nikolai was his technical pillar, as Woz was to Steve Jobs during Apple’s early days.
It was Nikolai who drew up the MTProto protocol that has attracted so many users with the promise of security — including those with nefarious intentions — and become a headache for the French authorities.
“My brother, being the genius that he is, he was able to create this encryption standard that we’re using up until this day with minor changes,” Pavel said in an interview with right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson. “He’s an expert in cryptography, he designed the basic principles of Telegram’s encryption.”
Seemingly attesting to Nikolai’s role in the company, French authorities have also issued a warrant for him, POLITICO reported last week. But Nikolai might be harder to grab by the collar than his brother, who was detained Aug. 24 upon arriving in Paris on his private jet.
While Pavel fled Russia in 2014, Nikolai is reported by some Russian media to still be inside the country, though POLITICO has not been able to independently confirm those reports. Nikolai is also reported to have a passport from Saint Kitts and Nevis — like his brother — as well as Latvian citizenship.
Most of what is known about Nikolai either comes from his younger brother, former colleagues or tabloid articles of dubious veracity. Taken together, they paint a picture of a quirky math genius with a disregard for the material life who exudes an aura of Soviet intelligentsia.
According to a biography of the brothers by Russian journalist Nikolai Kononov, at three years old Nikolai Durov would read books on astronomy — and understand them.
“He was shown live on Italian TV as a young prodigy kid who could solve cubic equations in real-time, being just 10 years old,” Pavel Durov, who never seems to miss an opportunity to praise his brother, said in his interview with Carlson.
At school, Nikolai won several international math Olympiads. He went on to become the lead brain within an elite club of geniuses at university in St. Petersburg, helping secure the team a first place in the world championship in competitive programming. 
He also reportedly inspired Pavel, four years his junior, to get into computer programming.
When Pavel launched VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, in 2006, Nikolai reportedly supported him with advice from Bonn, Germany, where he was studying at the time.
With Vkontakte’s success skyrocketing, Nikolai moved back to Russia to work alongside his brother as chief technical officer, bringing his own intellect but also, crucially, recruiting among the prodigy friends of his youth.
In recent years, the elder Durov reportedly worked on Telegram while also teaching math at the Steklov Mathematical Institute, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The institute lists Nikolai as a staff member on its website, though a separate profile page in his name on the Russian Academy of Sciences website was deleted following news of the arrest order in his name. 
The university did not respond to a request for comment.
Both Pavel and Nikolai Durov cut the figure of aloof men detached from ordinary life — like the one they enjoyed as children in St. Petersburg — spurred on by an Elon Musk-like libertarian streak.
“Telegram was founded by libertarians to preserve world freedom through encryption,” reads a white paper for TON, a blockchain platform and cryptocurrency token developed by Nikolai.
But in many ways, Nikolai is the antithesis of his brother.
While Pavel’s eccentricities are more public, bragging about his 100 biological children or showing off his sculpted chest on social media, Nikolai’s are more private. On VKontakte, where he last posted in 2018, he hides behind a black-and-white avatar of Nestor Makhno, an anarchist and Ukrainian revolutionary.
The few photos of him that are publicly available show a balding, heavyset man in glasses and poor fitting trousers.
Accounts of Nikolai by those who know him universally praise him as an unusually bright mind. But according to one estranged friend he also has unusually quirky habits.
Anton Rozenberg, a former software engineer at Telegram and a longtime friend of Nikolai’s with whom he fell out over a mutual love interest, has described the programming genius as “a big child, completely detached from real life.”
In an elaborate tell-all blog post in 2017, which received broad coverage in Russian media as a rare insider view into the Durovs, he wrote that Nikolai went by the nickname “Kot,” Russian for cat, and would erupt in periodic meowing, encouraging those around him to join in.
Even as Nikolai was taking the tech world by storm with his code, his mother, whom he supposedly fondly called “Big Cat,” took care of “almost every step” of his daily existence. 
Such stories could easily be dismissed as the sour grapes of a slighted friend-turned-enemy, but a recent article in the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted the family’s neighbors as saying Nikolai’s reliance on his mother had raised eyebrows.
A former colleague told the independent Meduza outlet that Nikolai was “kind of a rain man.”
Grigory Bakunov, who met with Nikolai several times when he himself was a top specialist at Russia’s search engine Yandex, dismissed that view. He described Nikolai as “a good communicator.”
“I wouldn’t say he’s ill-equipped for normal life,” Bakunov said.
Bakunov said Nikolai was outspoken and often came up with unexpected solutions to tech problems. 
“He has the make-up of a genius who, as a whole, are different from normal people. They are people who are hyper focused on their work,” Bakunov told POLITICO. 
Professionally, Pavel and Nikolai Durov seem to complement each other well. Nikolai reportedly acts as a brake on his more impulsive brother. Rozenberg, the former friend, told POLITICO in a phone conversation Nikolai “is one of the few people on the team who can stand up to him (Pavel),” whenever Pavel’s flashy, pie-in-the-sky ambitions alienate his own team.
“They form a good duo,” Bakunov said. “Nikolai takes care of the technical side, and Pavel is responsible for the PR and the product side of things.”
That winning formula, however, has now landed them both in the crosshairs of French prosecutors.