RUSSIAN WORLD Durov’s arrest and the paradoxes of freedom

The most sensational event for Russia in recent days was not the prediction of Ukraine’s victory in the war, announced by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the enthusiasm for the success of the offensive in the Kursk region, but the arrest of the Russian Internet tsar, Pavel Durov, at a French airport. Both the spokesmen of power and most of the voices of the opposition in Russia reacted surprisingly in unison in defense of freedom of expression and communication. The information war, in fact, is much broader and more devastating than the war on the ground, obviously not because of the number of victims and the scale of the destruction, but because of the actual perception of power or the depth of the fight against it.

The messaging platform Telegram, founded by Durov in 2013, is in fact the only space where the Russian-speaking public can access political content without blocks, interruptions or sanctions – and this applies not only to Russia, but to many countries in the Middle East, Central Asia and South-East Asia. In Western Europe, and in particular in France, Telegram is often associated with drug trafficking, terrorism, hacking and the dissemination of pornographic material, including paedophilia.

Pavel Durov, a St. Petersburg businessman who will turn 40 in October, has dominated the Russian social media space since 2006, when the new media began to spread around the world. Together with his brother Nikolai, he founded the first social network VKontakte (“In Contact”), which immediately became popular in Russia and in several former Soviet states, along with the other messenger, Odnoklassniki (“Classmates”), also linked to Durov’s system. These first tools came under the full control of the Kremlin after the conflict with Ukraine began in 2014, and the young digital magnate claimed his freedom to spread any information, even that which criticised the government, and remained on the throne of Telegram.

Durov then officially left Russia, where he returns whenever he feels the need, and took up residence in Dubai, taking citizenship of the Emirates, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and France, and renouncing his citizenship in the United States and Singapore, where he “felt under too much pressure,” as he said in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the only Western journalist the Russians want. He was granted a French passport on a strictly privileged basis, after several dinners with President Emmanuel Macron, who advised him to move his company’s headquarters to Paris.

His arrest in France – with bail after a week and an obligation to remain in the country – unleashed a storm of reaction in Russia, and raised many questions about his true motivations. Durov travelled to Paris on his private jet from Azerbaijan, where he would have had the opportunity to meet Vladimir Putin directly. It seems unlikely that he was unaware of the risks of the trip, given his connections at the highest level, so there is speculation that this is a move with dark purposes, unless it demonstrates the arrogance of someone who believes himself above all laws. The Russians suspect that the master of Telegram He has gone to hand over the access keys to crucial information on his messenger, in order to collaborate with the West in the global war.

The platform is indeed used intensively by Russian soldiers to communicate with each other (also by Ukrainians, for that matter), but it is not very credible that military commanders transmit strategic plans through it and, moreover, the system Telegram It has no real “passwords” because it is built on a castle of databases and servers that do not communicate with each other. Beyond the technical-military importance of the matter, its resonance demonstrates the broader significance of the networks in the world of communication; Russia, politically and economically isolated from the West and in search of a new dimension between two worlds, cannot give up its role in the virtual global space.

Control of information is indeed the main tool for imposing an interpretation of the facts favourable to one’s own ends. This is certainly nothing new: the manipulation of reality was already one of the main objectives of ancient Roman historians, from Julius Caesar himself to Titus Livy, Tacitus and Sallust, as an ideological weapon of the empire. The Russians have applied it from the medieval “Chronicle of Nestor”, which tells the story of Kievan Rus’ to present the “new people” called upon to rewrite history, which inspired the tsars and Soviet secretaries, to their current emulator in the Kremlin. A 19th century Russian writer and philosopher, Vladimir Odoevsky, had even prophesied the birth of blogs and the Internet in his utopian novel “Year 4338”, written in 1835, in which he tells how “magnetic telegraphs have been installed between houses, thanks to which people living at great distances can converse with each other”, and even “home newspapers, written by those who have more knowledge and which replace the usual correspondence”, where, in addition to reporting on the internal life of families, “different reflections, observations, discoveries and proposals” are distributed.

Indeed, there are a lot of proposals in Telegram and many of them raise real concerns. Durov has often had to reluctantly submit to the impositions of foreign states, as in 2022, when Germany accused him of failing to moderate content in accordance with the law, the same accusation that led to his arrest in Paris. Not long ago, the final version of the Digital Services Act, the EU regulation on digital services 2022/2065, was drafted in Europe, which representatives of Telegram They swear to comply scrupulously, blocking pirated content and not broadcasting banned channels to Europeans, such as RTthe branch of Russian Televisionone of the Kremlin’s main propaganda outlets. The European Commission has also stated that no violations of these rules have been detected by Telegram.

The Paris investigation is based on French law and accuses Durov of not cooperating with the local police. And here the question arises that worries the entire digital world, not only because of the fate of the boss of the ecosystem: to what extent is it justified to control what is spread on the net? Where is the line between “moderation” and censorship? If it is a question of defending oneself against cybercrime, then the right to interfere in any exchange of content must be granted, as in fact often happens beyond the law. This is indeed what Russia wants, even more than France or the United States, to the point of being able to control the thoughts and movements of the soul, and there is nothing like the virtual world to force open all the secret compartments of people’s inner lives.

That is why even in the most democratic countries there is less and less trust in the authorities and their statements, and everyone tries to reserve a space in which to feel more or less autonomous, as he tries to propose. Telegram more credibly than many popular social networks. Freedom of expression has always been an ambiguous concept and is becoming an increasingly confusing and contradictory ideal. Russia is waging war “against false liberalism”, the demon by which it invites all citizens of the world to move to the “world of purity of traditional values”, but demands freedom for Durov and his very untraditional instruments.

The ultimate weapon of war is not attack drones or nuclear bombs, it is ideology that distorts reality and turns a universal value such as the freedom of the individual into an instrument of control by power. If one can discuss to what extent it is legitimate to allow Ukrainians to use Western missiles against Russia, or to terminate ecclesiastical ties with Russian Orthodoxy, one cannot do without the commitment to define the content of freedom of thought, expression and speech, on the Internet or elsewhere, considering that in this field there are no geographical borders or zones of separation and non-belligerence. We are all Russians and French, we are all protagonists of Telegram or any other system that spreads words and images, which forces us to choose and decide in which reality we want to live.

“RUSSIAN WORLD” IS ASIANEWS’ NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO RUSSIA. DO YOU WANT TO RECEIVE IT EVERY SATURDAY IN YOUR EMAIL? SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER AT THIS LINK