Telegram founder Pavel Durov revealed in an interview released on Tuesday that he suspects he survived a poisoning attempt in 2018. Speaking to podcaster Lex Fridman, Durov said the incident occurred in the spring of 2018, when he was seeking financing for the TON blockchain project and “a couple of countries were trying to ban Telegram.” He described the experience as “hard to forget”:
That was the only instant in my life when I thought I was dying. I came back home, opened the door of my townhouse, the place I rented. I had this weird neighbor, and he left something for me there around the door. And one hour after, when I was already in my bed, so I was living alone, I felt very bad. I felt pain all over my body. I tried to get up and go to the bathroom. But while I was going there, I felt that the functions of my body started to switch off. First, the eyesight and hearing, then I had difficulty breathing, everything accompanied by very acute pain — heart, stomach, all blood vessels. […] I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see anything. It was very painful.
I think it’s over. I thought, well, I have had a good life. I managed to accomplish a few things. And then I collapsed on the floor, but I don’t remember it, because the pain covered everything. I found myself on the floor the next day. It was already bright. And I couldn’t stand up. I was super weak. I looked at my arms and my body, blood vessels were broken all over my body. Something like this never happened to me. I couldn’t walk for two weeks after.
Fridman asked Durov if he believes his apparent poisoning was related to “the complexity that was happening with the pressure from the government on VK,” the social media platform he ran before creating Telegram. In response, Durov spoke at length about the December 2011 protests in Moscow against Russia’s parliamentary election results. He then recounted, not for the first time, his defiance of government orders to take down VK posts used to organize demonstrations.
Durov did not speculate further about the timing of his alleged poisoning, nor did he mention the contemporaneous spring 2018 poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Great Britain, which the U.K. government has attributed to Russian intelligence agents.
Fridman also asked about reports that Russia may attempt to ban Telegram again. Durov called the prospect “incredibly sad” and acknowledged that “it can definitely happen.” He pointed out that the Russian authorities are “planning to migrate users from existing messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram to their own homegrown tool.” At the same time, he linked Moscow’s efforts to “an alarming trend,” in which European countries’ “legitimate-sounding pretexts” for “fighting free speech” (such as combating misinformation or election interference) ultimately legitimize precedents that authoritarian regimes (he named China and Iran) can also use:
They love you when you’re protecting the freedom of speech in a country that is far from them, or better yet, in a country that is their geopolitical rival. They praise you for that, but then they have this bipolar attitude when you do the same in their own country. And they say, “No, no, no, no, no. We loved you for protecting freedom of speech, but not here. Not in my backyard. We don’t need it here. We’re all right. We have free press.”
