VK (service)
Based on Wikipedia: VK (service)
In December 2024, something remarkable happened in Russian cyberspace. For the first time ever, a domestic video platform overtook Google in monthly web traffic. The platform was VK Video, part of the social network known as VK—short for VKontakte, which translates to "InContact" in Russian. While YouTube faced deliberate throttling by Russian authorities, millions of users quietly migrated to what the Kremlin had positioned as the acceptable alternative.
This wasn't an overnight shift. It was the culmination of nearly two decades of corporate intrigue, government pressure, and the gradual transformation of a Facebook clone into one of the most politically consequential social networks on the planet.
The Facebook of the East
VK began the way many tech success stories do: with a college student who saw an American innovation and thought, "We could do that here."
Pavel Durov was fresh out of Saint Petersburg State University's Faculty of Philology in 2006 when his former classmate Vyacheslav Mirilashvili showed him this new website called Facebook. At the time, Facebook was just two years old, still expanding from its Harvard origins to universities worldwide. But it was clearly onto something.
The friends decided to build a Russian equivalent. They had complementary assets: Mirilashvili had a billionaire father willing to provide startup capital. Durov had a brother named Nikolai, a multiple winner of international mathematics and programming competitions, who could actually build the thing. A third co-founder, Lev Leviev—an Israeli classmate of Mirilashvili's—handled operational management.
The domain name Vkontakte.ru was registered in October 2006. By February 2007, the site had already crossed 100,000 users, making it the second-largest player in Russia's nascent social networking market. That same month, the site suffered a severe distributed denial-of-service attack—what techies call a DDoS attack, where malicious actors flood a website with so many requests that it crashes. Someone, apparently, was worried about the competition.
The growth continued anyway. One million users by July 2007. Ten million by April 2008. By December 2008, VK had overtaken Odnoklassniki (meaning "Classmates"), its main Russian rival, to become the country's dominant social network.
Features That Defined a Platform
What VK offered was familiar to anyone who had used Facebook, but with Russian sensibilities layered on top. Users could post status updates, share photos, message friends privately or in group chats of up to 500 people. They could create public pages for celebrities and businesses, organize events, and play browser-based games.
But VK diverged from its American inspiration in revealing ways.
Take the "like" button. On Facebook, clicking "like" automatically broadcasts your preference to your friends—a design choice that maximizes engagement but also creates social pressure. VK took a more private approach. Liked content gets saved to a personal Favorites section without being pushed to your wall. You have to actively choose to share something with your network.
Then there was music. VK allowed users to upload audio files, create playlists, and share songs through messages and posts. The platform became, in effect, a massive repository of pirated music—a feature that delighted users while horrifying record labels. More on that legal mess shortly.
The synchronization features revealed something about the platform's ambitions. Any post you made on VK could automatically appear on your Facebook or Twitter accounts. But not the reverse. VK was positioning itself as the center of your digital life, not as one node among many.
The Geography of Influence
By 2017, VK had become the fourth most-visited website in Russia. But its reach extended far beyond Russian borders, following the contours of the former Soviet Union and Russian-speaking diaspora communities.
In Belarus, it ranked third. Kazakhstan, sixth. Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, eighth. Latvia, twelfth. These weren't random patterns. They traced the boundaries of Russian cultural and linguistic influence, the soft power that had persisted long after the Soviet collapse.
Ukraine presented the most politically charged case. VK was hugely popular there—the fourth most-visited site in the country. But this popularity became a liability after Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent war in eastern Ukraine.
In May 2017, Ukraine's government banned VK entirely, along with other Russian internet services like Yandex search and Mail.ru. The stated justification was national security: these platforms could be used to spread Russian propaganda and harvest data on Ukrainian citizens. The ban was enforced through internet service providers, though technically savvy users could still access the site through VPNs—software that disguises your location on the internet.
The ban worked, more or less. According to the Internet Association of Ukraine, the share of Ukrainian internet users visiting VK daily plummeted from 54 percent in September 2016 to just 10 percent by September 2019. Facebook, the Western alternative, became the country's most popular social network.
The Hostile Takeover
If you want to understand VK's transformation from scrappy startup to state-adjacent platform, you need to follow the money. More specifically, you need to follow the shares.
At founding, the ownership was straightforward: Pavel Durov held 20 percent, the Mirilashvili family held 60 percent, and Lev Leviev held 10 percent. Durov controlled more than his stake suggested, however, because he held proxy voting rights from other shareholders.
The complications began in 2007 when Digital Sky Technologies—an investment firm run by Yuri Milner—acquired nearly 25 percent of the company for $16.3 million. DST would later become famous for early investments in Facebook, Twitter, and countless other Silicon Valley giants. But its Russian portfolio included both VK and its rival Odnoklassniki.
When DST reorganized in 2010, spinning off international and Russian assets into separate entities, VK ended up under Mail.ru Group. Mail.ru kept accumulating shares, reaching nearly 40 percent by mid-2011. The company made no secret of its ambition to acquire 100 percent control, valuing the entire social network at two to three billion dollars.
Here's where things got messy. In the summer of 2011, the original co-founders—the Mirilashvili family and Leviev—discussed selling their stakes for Mail.ru shares in Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. Durov refused to cooperate. The co-founders then considered an initial public offering as an alternative exit strategy.
In March 2012, something strange happened. Durov claimed he "accidentally" became plugged into negotiations where Mirilashvili and Leviev were discussing selling directly to Alisher Usmanov, Mail.ru Group's main investor. Whether this was an accident or surveillance is impossible to know from the outside.
Durov's response was immediate and dramatic. On the same day, he deleted the VK pages of the original co-investors. He stopped communicating with them entirely. He announced that VK would postpone its IPO indefinitely.
This was the beginning of an increasingly bitter struggle for control.
The Ouster
For a brief moment in 2012, it looked like Durov had won. Mail.ru Group announced it would yield control to him by offering him voting rights on its shares. Combined with his personal 12 percent stake, this gave Durov 52 percent of the votes.
But the arrangement didn't last. In April 2013, the Mirilashvili family sold their 40 percent stake to United Capital Partners for $1.12 billion. Leviev sold his 8 percent in the same deal. United Capital Partners was now the largest single shareholder.
Then, in January 2014, Durov himself sold his 12 percent stake to Ivan Tavrin, the CEO of MegaFon—Russia's second-largest mobile phone operator, controlled by none other than Alisher Usmanov. Tavrin promptly sold those shares to Mail.ru, giving Usmanov's empire a controlling 52 percent stake.
Why would Durov sell? The accounts differ. What's clear is that by early 2014, Durov had lost effective control of the company he'd founded.
What happened next has become the stuff of internet legend.
On April 1, 2014, Durov submitted his resignation to the board. The company confirmed he had resigned. Given the timing—April Fools' Day—many assumed it was a joke. Durov himself said as much on April 3rd.
But on April 21st, Durov was formally dismissed as CEO. The board claimed he had failed to withdraw his letter of resignation within the required timeframe. Joke or not, the resignation stood.
Durov's public explanation was explosive. He claimed the company had been "effectively taken over by Vladimir Putin's political faction." He said his dismissal resulted from two refusals: refusing to hand over personal details of users to federal law enforcement, and refusing to shut down a VK group dedicated to Euromaidan—the Ukrainian protest movement that had toppled the pro-Russian government in Kiev just months earlier.
Durov left Russia. "I have no plans to go back," he said. "The country is incompatible with internet business at the moment."
The State's Embrace
With Durov gone, the consolidation accelerated. In September 2014, Mail.ru Group bought the remaining 48 percent stake from United Capital Partners for $1.5 billion, becoming VK's sole proprietor.
But the story didn't end there. In December 2021, two entities closely tied to the Russian state—Gazprombank, owned by the gas giant Gazprom, and Sogaz, an insurance company linked to the Kremlin—bought 57.3 percent of VK's shares. The state now held the controlling interest in Russia's dominant social network.
This mattered enormously when Russia invaded Ukraine in full force in February 2022. As Western platforms like Facebook and Instagram were blocked in Russia, VK stood ready to absorb the millions of users suddenly cut off from the global internet. According to one poll, VK was expected to gain most of those displaced users.
The blocking of YouTube—or more precisely, its deliberate throttling to make videos unwatchably slow—pushed even more users toward VK Video. By late 2024, the transition was effectively complete. Russia had its own self-contained social media ecosystem, largely insulated from Western influence and firmly under state supervision.
The Copyright Wars
Long before the political drama, VK faced a different existential threat: lawsuits.
The platform's permissive attitude toward user uploads made it a paradise for piracy. Users shared movies, television shows, and music with abandon. The copyright holders were not amused.
In 2008, Russia's leading television channel and the state broadcasting company VGTRK sued VK over unlicensed copies of two films. The case wound its way through the courts until 2010, when Russia's High Arbitration Court ruled in VK's favor. The court determined that VK wasn't responsible for its users' copyright violations—a ruling that would have been unthinkable in the United States under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's notice-and-takedown framework.
A 2012 ruling went partially against VK, ordering the company to pay $7,000 to Gala Records (now Warner Music Russia) for not being "active enough" in addressing copyrighted materials. Seven thousand dollars was a rounding error for a company valued in the billions.
VK developed a pragmatic response. It offered content removal tools for copyright holders, including bulk removal for major rightsholders. It partnered with legal streaming providers like Ivi.ru, which had licensing deals with all the Hollywood majors. These partnerships allowed content owners to replace pirated uploads with legal, ad-supported or subscription versions.
By 2014, Russia's media regulator was announcing that VK would "complete the process of legalization" by early 2015. Whether this happened in any meaningful sense depends on your definition of legalization. VK remained a place where you could find almost anything, if you knew where to look.
Attack Platform
There's a darker side to VK's story that rarely makes the headlines.
Because VK was one of the most visited sites in the Russian internet, its visitors represented a massive pool of computing power. And VK wasn't above using that power offensively.
In 2008 and again in 2012, VK launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against other websites—using its own users' browsers as unwitting weapons. The technique was simple but effective: insert an invisible iframe into VK's pages along with a bit of JavaScript code that would periodically reload the iframe. Each reload sent a request to the target website. Multiply that by millions of simultaneous VK users, and you had an overwhelming flood of traffic.
The 2008 target was the Runet Prize voting page. The 2012 target was Antigate, a service that solved CAPTCHAs—those "prove you're not a robot" puzzles—for a fee. Antigate figured out what was happening and responded with delicious malice: when they detected traffic coming from VK's iframes, they redirected those requests to xHamster, a pornography website. VK, which marketed itself as family-friendly, was suddenly serving porn to its users' browsers.
VK ceased the attack.
The Broader Pattern
VK's trajectory from independent startup to state-controlled platform mirrors a broader pattern in authoritarian societies. Innovation happens in the gaps between government attention. Success attracts that attention. And eventually, the state either acquires control directly or ensures that loyal actors do.
The result is what scholars call "sovereign internet"—national networks that remain technically connected to the global internet but are increasingly walled off from it in practice. Russia, China, and Iran have all moved in this direction, each in their own way.
For the hundreds of millions of Russian speakers who use VK daily, the platform remains indispensable. It's where they message friends, share photos of their children, organize events, discover music, argue about politics. That these activities now happen under state surveillance is simply the price of participation.
Pavel Durov, meanwhile, went on to found Telegram, an encrypted messaging app that has become one of the most important communication tools for activists, journalists, and ordinary people seeking privacy from government surveillance. As of this writing, Telegram has over 700 million users worldwide.
Durov learned something from his VK experience. With Telegram, he built a company with no fixed headquarters, incorporated in multiple jurisdictions, explicitly designed to resist the kind of pressure that cost him VK. Whether that design will hold up against determined state actors remains an open question.
But that's a story for another time.