Ivan Pavlov spends a lot of time travelling between Moscow and St.Petersburg. Were you to encounter him in a sleeping compartment on the high-speed train, Pavlov would look like any other successful corporate lawyer; a sensible haircut, a serious look, flitting from city to city for multi-million dollar contracts. Hardly a figure you’d suspect to be a fearless fighter for government transparency.
A taste of the law
For as long as he can remember, Ivan Pavlov wanted to be a lawyer. But it was the height of perestroika, the USSR was close to collapse and the young man from St. Petersburg didn’t make it to law school.
“I realised exactly what was happening, and enrolled at what was then the Ulyanov-Lenin Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute. I chose to study information technology: it felt like something new, something that would be needed in the future. And I wasn’t wrong,” he says.
