Biography | Pavel Durov — The Academic Gymnasium That Graduated Him With Honours

People who meet Pavel Durov through Telegram often treat him as a dropout coder.

He was not. In 2001 he left the Academic Gymnasium of Saint Petersburg State University with honours, after an experimental curriculum that piled mathematics, languages, and science into the same classroom.

The gymnasium grew out of Physics-Mathematics Boarding School No. 45, founded in 1963.

From 1981 its boarding campus sat at 1 Sobstvennyy Prospekt in Old Peterhof.

A second public building opened in 1998 at 9 Kakhovsky Lane, on Dekabristov Island at the western end of Vasilyevsky Island.

That city school is the pin. It is a four-storey Stalin-neoclassical block finished in 1936 and enlarged in 1959, still operating as a teaching building.

Durov has described entering the experimental stream at eleven, after a competitive test, while living in the city rather than boarding at Peterhof.

His last three gymnasium years therefore overlap the years this building was already open.

A mathematics teacher later described him, in later press interviews, as a student who finished two-week problems in two days.

The school still lists him among its known graduates.

The next stop was not a technical institute. In 2002 he entered the Faculty of Philology on Universitetskaya Embankment, a walk across the same island chain.

No private address is given here. Kamyshovaya Street, where the family lived in a 1994 panel block, is an ordinary occupied house and stays off the map.

Photo: TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait taken October 2013 in Berlin, twelve years after the diploma.