In the journalistic shorthand of his native Russia, Pavel Durov is unfailingly described as his country’s Mark Zuckerberg. Though flattering, the comparison with the Facebook founder does not seem quite right to me: it overstates Durov’s commercial success while, if anything, understating his personal accomplishments.

在帕韦尔尠坧夫(Pavel Durov)的祖国俄罗斯，新闻报道一直将称他为俄罗斯的马克丠克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)。尽管这是恭维之语，将他与Facebook创始人相比在我看来并不十分恰当：这夸大了杜罗夫的商业成功，却没有充分反映出他的个人成就。

Like Zuckerberg, the boyish tech entrepreneur from St Petersburg created his country’s most popular social network, VKontakte, which revolutionised the Russian internet. But in 2011 Durov fell foul of the Kremlin by refusing to close down the pages of opposition activists as protests swelled against the returning president, Vladimir Putin. He became a target of increasing police harassment and was, in effect, forced to sell out of VKontakte to pro-Kremlin investors. Fired as the company’s chief executive in 2014, he quit Russia with $300m in his pocket and founded a new messaging app, Telegram. He now wanders the world preaching the virtues of secure communications and libertarianism.

像扎克伯格一样，这位来自圣彼得堡、带着孩子气的科技企业家创建了俄罗斯最具人气的社交网络VKontakte，为俄罗斯互联网带来了革命性变化。但在2011年，抗议普京重任总统的声浪扩大之时，由于拒绝关闭反对派活动人士的页面，杜罗夫触怒了克里姆林宫。警方对他的侵扰日渐增加，他事实上被强迫将VKontakte卖给了亲克里姆林宫的投资者。2014年，他被解除了公司首席执行官的职务，带着3亿美元离开了俄罗斯，并打造了一款新的消息应用Telegram。他现在环游世界，宣扬安全通信和自由主义的价值。

Comparisons aside, Durov has certainly packed a lot into his 30 years and retains grandiose plans for the future. So I am a little surprised when a slim, unassuming man slips into a sleek Italian restaurant in Mayfair and introduces himself in quiet, near-flawless English. His appearance, all-black clothing and rebellious instincts have led to innumerable comparisons with the mysterious action hero Neo in the Matrix films. But Durov’s pale complexion, jet black hair, and doe eyes remind me more of a dreamy prince in a Disney cartoon.

抛开这样的比较，杜罗夫在他30年的人生里完成的事情无疑不少，他对未来还有不少宏伟计划。所以，当一个纤瘦谦逊的人，悄然走入伦敦梅菲尔区(Mayfair)一家典雅的意大利餐厅，轻声用近乎完美的英语介绍自己时，我有点吃惊。他的外貌、一身黑衣的打扮和叛逆的本性像极了电影《黑客帝国》(Matrix)中神秘的动作英雄尼奥(Neo)。但是他白皙的肤色、乌黑的头发以及小鹿般的眼睛，又让我觉得他更像迪斯尼(Disney)卡通片里的梦幻王子。

He tells me that he chose Quattro Passi for lunch because he is staying nearby and likes the cooking. “Italian food is simple and healthy, and it’s easier for a vegetarian to choose something from the menu,” he says. It perhaps also reminds him of his childhood: Durov spent several years in Italy, in Turin, because his father Valery (who holds a PhD in philology and is an expert on ancient Rome) was employed there. “I was born in the Soviet Union. Then when I was three or four we moved to Italy and by the time we got back there was no more Soviet Union,” he says.

他告诉我，之所以选择来Quattro Passi吃午餐，是因为他就住在这附近，而且他喜欢这里的菜。“意大利美食简单又健康，素食者在这里更容易点菜，”他说。意大利餐厅可能也勾起他的童年回忆：因为父亲瓦列里（Valery，语言学博士、古罗马专家）的工作，杜罗夫在意大利都灵待过几年。“我出生在苏联。我三四岁的时候，我家搬到了意大利，等我们回去的时候，苏联已经不复存在了，”他说。

The restaurant is a hedge fund manager’s heaven of silver decorations, mirrors and taupe furnishings. We study the menu. Durov orders burrata and plain spaghetti with cheese for the main course. “White?” the waitress enquires. “White and, please, no salt or a minimal amount of salt. Thank you,” he replies. After asking whether they have any rye bread (they have none), he orders some homemade brown bread instead. This makes my order of minestrone and monkfish with cherries seem racy.

这家店配有对冲基金经理最喜爱的银色内饰、镜子和灰褐色家具。我们看了看菜单。杜罗夫点了布拉塔芝士(burrata)和一份只加芝士的意大利面作为主菜。“加白汁？”侍者询问道。他回答：“请加白汁，不要加盐或者只加一点点盐。谢谢。”在询问他们是否提供黑麦面包（他们没有）以后，杜罗夫改为点了一些黑面包。这让我点的意大利浓菜汤和鮟鱇鱼配樱桃显得有些太丰盛了。

I ask him about his lifestyle as an international nomad. Durov, who says he is addicted to big cities but does not like the concept of countries, explains how he and a core team of four engineers from Telegram take their work with them round the world. “We choose a place and stay there for two or three months, then we relocate to the next place. Adiós.”

我询问他这种浪迹各国的生活方式怎么样。杜罗夫说，大城市让他着迷，但他不喜欢“国家”这个概念，解释了为什么他和由4名工程师组成的Telegram核心团队带着工作环游世界。“我们选一个地方，在那里停留两到三个月，然后说声再见，再去下一个地方。”

He travels on a passport from St Kitts and, over the past year, he and his team have worked out of San Francisco, New York, London, Paris and Berlin, and he is off again soon to Finland. The peripatetic lifestyle also suits his business, given that one of its great selling points is security. “Since the day we started Telegram 18 months ago we haven’t disclosed a single byte of user data to third parties, including government officials.”

他使用圣基茨和尼维斯(St Kitts and Nevis)签发的护照旅行。过去一年，他和他的团队在旧金山、纽约、伦敦、巴黎和柏林工作过，他马上又要去芬兰了。这种四处流动的生活方式对他的业务也有好处，因为其最大卖点之一就是安全。“自18个月前我们创立Telegram以来，我们从未向包括政府官员的任何第三方泄露过哪怕一个字节的用户数据。”

Though Telegram is registered as both a British and a US company, it does not disclose where it rents offices or the legal entities it uses to rent them. This helps shelter his team from any “unnecessary influence”, he says, and enables the company to protect its 62m users from data requests from government. Telegram uses a distributed network of servers in several different jurisdictions, rather than a central hub like most other messaging apps.

尽管Telegram是一家同时在英国和美国注册的公司，该公司并未披露其租用的办公地点位于何处，或者用来租用这些办公地点的法人实体是什么。这有助于其团队避开“不必要的影响”，杜罗夫说，这可以使公司保护其6200万用户，免于被政府索要数据。不同于使用一个中央枢纽的大部分消息应用，Telegram的服务器网络分布在好几个不同司法管辖区。

The initial impulse for both of his companies has stemmed, Durov says, from satisfying a personal need: the wish to communicate with his university friends in the case of VKontakte, and the necessity of creating a secure messaging system with Telegram. He had the idea for the latter after he came under intense scrutiny from the Russian authorities in 2011. Armed police attempted to storm his apartment in St Petersburg and he realised that his communications were being tapped. He wanted a means of communicating securely with his 34-year-old brother Nikolai, a mathematician and engineer who helped found VKontakte and later developed the encryption code for the Telegram app.

杜罗夫说，他创建两家公司的最初动力，是满足个人需求：想和大学朋友交流的愿望使他创建了VKontakte，打造一个安全消息系统的必要性让他创建了Telegram。他的后一个想法是在2011年俄罗斯政府对他进行严密监视后萌生的。当时配有武器的警察试图闯入他在圣彼得堡的公寓，他意识到自己的通讯被监听了。他想要一种能与哥哥安全通讯的方式。杜罗夫的哥哥尼古拉(Nikolai) 34岁，是一名数学家和工程师，他帮助杜罗夫创建了VKontakte，后来又为Telegram应用开发了加密代码。

“Our right for private communication and privacy is more important than the marginal threats that some politicians would like to make us afraid of. If you get rid of emotion for a minute and think about the threat of terrorism statistically, it’s not even there. The probability that you will slip on a wet floor in your bathroom and die is a thousand times higher than the probability of you dying as a result of terrorism.”

“我们进行私人通讯和保有隐私的权利比一些政治人士想让我们为之感到恐惧的微不足道的威胁重要得多。如果你能抛开情感一分钟，从统计上想一想恐怖主义的威胁，就会发现其根本不存在。你在浴室的湿地板上滑倒而死的可能性要比死于恐怖主义的可能性高一千倍。”

But those statistics can be used to support different conclusions, I counter. Maybe they show that the security services are gleaning vital information from data intercepts and are preventing many more terrorist attacks. Doesn’t end-to-end encryption, such as he uses, only tilt the field in the terrorist’s favour?

我提出反对，这些统计数据也可以被用以支持不同的结论。它们或许表明，安全部门通过数据截取搜集到了关键信息，大大防止了更多恐怖袭击发生。端对端加密技术，正如杜罗夫所使用的，难道不是仅仅为恐怖分子制造了有利条件吗？

He argues it is simplistic to assume the relatively rare occurrence of terrorist incidents in the west is necessarily a sign of government’s effectiveness. Given the ease of committing terrorist acts, maybe it reflects the lack of terrorist intent. “I think we in western civilisation tend to overestimate our own abilities to solve the problems and challenges that we face,” he says.

他表示，认为西方恐怖事件相对很少发生必然显示出政府打击得力，这种看法过于简单化了。考虑到实施恐怖主义行动的容易程度，或许这反映了恐怖主义意图并没有那么多。“我认为，西方文明中的我们倾向于高估我们解决所面对问题和挑战的能力，”杜罗夫表示。

For example, he continues, the pharmaceuticals industry persuades us we need to take pills to keep healthy. “But I don’t use anything pharmaceutical companies have to offer and I’m still healthy. Maybe we shouldn’t be too dependent on the advertisements companies want us to believe. Maybe we shouldn’t be too dependent on politicians trying to make us believe that we are safe only because of their actions.”

他继续说，比如，制药行业说服我们相信，我们需要吃药才能保持健康。“但我从不服用制药公司生产的任何东西，我依然很健康。或许我们不应该太依赖公司想要我们相信的广告，也不应该太依赖政治人士——他们想要我们相信，我们之所以安全，完全是因为他们采取了行动。”

Moreover, if the security services really want to access a user’s data, he says, they can try going to Google and Apple. “Since there is always the probability that these companies can allow the security agencies direct access to your device, nobody can be 100 per cent sure, but one thing Telegram does is make mass surveillance impossible.”

此外，杜罗夫表示，如果安全部门真的想获取一位用户的数据，它们可以试着去找谷歌(Google)和苹果(Apple)。“因为这些公司允许安全机构直接访问你的设备的可能性始终存在，没人能够百分之百确定，但Telegram所做的其中一件事就是断绝大规模监视的可能。”