Does Pavel Durov smoke cigarettes?: No [5]KP.Does Pavel Durov drink alcohol?: No [6]KP.Pavel Durov is a Russian entrepreneur and the man behind the social networking site VK, and the Telegram Messenger. Pavel Durov spent most of his childhood in Turin, Italy where he attended an Italian elementary school, and later, he returned to Russia in 2001. Childhood photograph of Pavel Durov.Pavel Durov is also known as the Russian Mark Zuckerberg as he developed the social media platform VKontakte (VK), which is quite similar to Facebook. The social media platform was launched in the year 2006, and the website was developed by Pavel and his brother, Nikolai Durov. Pavel was the CEO of the company, but later in 2014, he was dismissed as CEO of VK after selling the company to Mail.ru, a major Russian internet company. After this, Pavel and his brother went into a self-imposed exile. Pavel Durovs VK accounts homepage.The social media platform VK was being used by people to form pages of the politicians contesting the 2011 elections for 450 seats in the 6th State Duma. Later, in the same year, he had a standoff with the Russian police in St. Petersburg as Pavel turned down the governments demand of shutting down the pages of opposing politicians. In response to this, Durov posted a picture on his social media in which a dog was seen wearing a hoodie with his tongue sticking out. Pavel Durovs response to the governments demand to remove the social media pages of opposing politicians.The office of VKontakte was situated on the fifth and sixth floors of an iconic building Singer House, which is located in central St. Petersburg. In 2012, Pavel Durov and his employees were seen throwing out money from the windows of their offices. They threw out about 1,000 worth of money in the form of paper planes and each note was of the denomination 5,000 Ruble (about 50) to thank people for supporting their social media platform VKontakte.In 2012, a major Russian internet company, Mail.ru, owned by Ivan Tavrin, offered to buy the Russian social media platform, VK. In response to this, Pavel posted a picture of himself extending his middle finger to show that he had refused the offer made by the company. Later in December 2013, Durov was pressured to sell 12% of VK stocks to Ivan Tavrin. In 2014, Pavel sold all the remaining shares to Mail.ru; making them the sole owner of the social media platform VK. Pavel Durovs Instagram post in response to Mail.rus offer of buying VK social media platform.In April 2014, Pavel left Russia and obtained the citizenship of Saint Kitts and Nevis, an island country in the West Indies. Pavel left Russia along with his brother Nikolai and got citizenship by donating $250,000 to the Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation. He also received $300 million in cash through Swiss Banks, and he decided to focus on a new venture of his own.Pavel founded a cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging application called Telegram. He founded this with the help of his brother in 2013. The headquarters of the company is located in London and Dubai. The application provides end-to-end encrypted video calling, instant messaging, file sharing, and many other services. Later, Pavel tried to launch the Gram cryptocurrency and the TON platform; he raised $1.7 billion for the funding of his startup; however, the ventures were stopped by the federal courts.In 2011, Pavel donated a million dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation is an American non-profit and charitable organization that owns the internet domain names of many movement projects and host sites like Wikipedia.