Born in a Country That No Longer Exists

In 1984, the Soviet Union was still very much alive — a communist state where the government controlled almost everything: • The shops and factories • The newspapers and television • What people were allowed to say There was no free press and no free speech. Borders were closed. Most people could not simply travel to the West. Shops were often half empty. Ordinary things that families in Europe took for granted — toys, nice food, foreign cartoons — were rare or impossible to find. People queued for hours for basic goods. This was the world Pavel was born into.

Pavel's family was unusual. His father, Valery Durov, was a respected scholar of ancient languages — an expert on Roman history who later led a department at Saint Petersburg State University. His older brother Nikolai would become a true genius: reading at age three, winning the world's top mathematics competition for students three times, and earning two doctorates in maths. "I learned pretty much everything from my brother," Pavel later said. Before the internet existed, Nikolai was his living encyclopedia.

For a small child, moving from the Soviet Union to Italy was like stepping into a different planet. Italy was a free, open, Western country. The shops were full. There were toys, ice cream, and cartoons everywhere. People could say what they thought. Pavel has said that even as a four- or five-year-old, he could feel the difference clearly. A society without freedom, he saw, could not produce all of this — the goods, the ideas, the choices. That early contrast — grey, controlled Soviet life on one side, and free, colourful Italy on the other — became the seed of everything he later believed.