The founder of Russia’s leading social media network — a wunderkind often described as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg — has left his post as CEO and fled the country as cronies of Russian President Vladimir Putin have made steady inroads into the company’s ownership.
The slow-motion ouster of Pavel Durov from the network known as VKontakte, or “In Contact,” is the latest sign that independent media outlets in Russia have become increasingly imperiled.
Although months in the making, the loss of Durov’s leadership in VKontakte means that the space for free speech on the Russian Web could shrink even further.
Vkontakte users were even spreading jokes last week that the new nickname for the “In Contact” Web site should be: “In Censorship.”
As one of his final acts of defiance, Durov posted online what he said were documents from the security services demanding personal details from 39 Ukraine-linked groups on VKontakte, also known as VK.
Kremlin pressure on VK has been accompanied by increasing enforcement of Russia’s law against extremism, which took some prominent opposition and pro-Ukraine sites off the Web last month.
On Tuesday last week, the Russian parliament passed a law requiring social media sites to keep their servers in Russia and save all information about their users for at least half a year. The same law — which will go into effect in August if signed by Putin — gave bloggers the same legal status and responsibilities as media outlets, making them more vulnerable to accusations of libel or extremism.
Since the protests began in Ukraine, Putin and much of Russia’s media have amplified their patriotic rhetoric, proclaiming the need to secure Russia from enemies both foreign and domestic. In a televised call-in show a week ago, Putin equated those critical of Kremlin policy in Ukraine with Bolshevik revolutionaries who rooted for Russia’s defeat in World War I and discussions about the country’s traitorous Fifth Column have become the fare of state television.
VK, which largely resembles an older version of Facebook, attracts about 60 million users daily, primarily from countries in the former Soviet Union, vastly outstripping Facebook’s reach in the region. It played an instrumental role in bringing hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets in late 2011 in the wake of widely manipulated parliamentary elections and it has played a part in drawing crowds to the Kiev protest movement that helped oust pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in February.
“There’s been a trend that started with the protests of December 2011, when the authorities started fearing the crowd and especially the online crowd,” said Anton Nossik, Russia’s leading Internet entrepreneur. “The pressure of censorship is mounting on Russian Web sites from lawmakers who think that the Internet is their foe.”
The 29-year-old Durov has cultivated a reputation as a rebel willing to stand up to Kremlin pressure, ostentatiously refusing to shut down VK groups linked to the Russian opposition movement or to give out personal information on its leaders.
He also has become known for more eccentric stunts, like throwing paper airplanes made of 5,000 ruble (US$140) notes out of his office window, or posting a photograph of his middle finger online after breaking up a major deal with a pro-Kremlin investor.
Since opening in 2006, VK has thrived on the same devil-may-care reputation as its founder. While much of the site’s success was thanks to Facebook’s sluggish adaptation to the Russian market, VK cemented its status as a Russian staple by hosting thousands of pirated video and music files that users can watch for free.
It did not take long for VK to attract the attention of investors, as well as the government. In 2010, one major investor who was friendly with Durov handed his stake in the company over to Mail.ru Group, a holding company owned by Russia’s richest man and Putin crony Alisher Usmanov.
That move was followed by a large sell-off by Durov’s old allies in April last year to United Capital Partners (UCP), a company reportedly owned by Igor Sechin, the chief of Russian oil giant Rosneft and a member of Putin’s inner circle.
That left Durov, who only learned of the deal after it had been signed, as the last remaining holdout in the company ownership. He stayed on as CEO, but increasingly found himself in standoffs with its new stakeholders.
“A shareholder war started,” said Nikolai Kononov, who wrote the book Durov’s Code about VK. “It seems that Durov already understood at that moment that he should sell his shares, but at the same time, he wanted to preserve the project he built, as well as his reputation. Hence why it’s taken so long.”
That same month, a criminal investigation was opened into Durov’s alleged participation in a hit-and-run incident with a St Petersburg police officer — a case that his supporters said was fabricated and linked to political pressure on the organization.
In June last year, the case against Durov was quietly closed, but the message it sent was clear. In January, he sold his remaining 12 percent share in the company to Ilya Tavrin, another businessman linked to Usmanov. He also moved to diversify his portfolio outside Russia: With the help of his brother, he developed the messenger service Telegram, a Berlin-based company that he marketed as a completely hack-resistant communication tool, impenetrable even to the prying eyes of the US National Security Agency.
If Durov wanted to develop Telegram and cultivate a name for himself as an uncompromising businessman abroad, that would mean keeping VK free of Kremlin influence as long as he was CEO of the company, Kononov said.
Yet Durov’s timing could not have been worse: After Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 amid the large anti-Kremlin street protests, he tried to consolidate his power by passing a series of laws clamping down on the opposition.
Many deemed social media, which had provided a platform for protest leaders, a likely next casualty. This spring, the Livejournal blog of opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was wiped off the Web.
For VK, which continued to allow groups that backed Navalny or Ukraine’s protest movement to exist, it appeared it would only be a matter of time before its pro-Kremlin investors would start cracking down.
Durov’s exit from the company was drawn out and chaotic. After selling his shares in January, he posted a message on April 1 that he was quitting the company, only to say two days later it had been an April Fool’s joke.
Then on Tuesday last week, he said he had been fired from the company and only found out through the media. Yet one of the pro-Kremlin stakeholders claimed that Durov had signed his own resignation letter a month ago and never withdrew it, while another insisted that he had no right to quit. Durov is being sued by one of the stakeholders, UCP, for allegedly diverting money and programming talent from VK and using them to develop Telegram instead.
Durov told online technology magazine Techcrunch that he had left Russia and had no plans to return in the near future.
“In this way, today VKontakte will be transferred to the full control of Igor Sechin and Alisher Usmanov,” he wrote on his VK page on Monday last week. “Under the conditions in Russia something like this was probably inevitable, but I am happy that we held out for seven-and-a-half years. We did a lot.”
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