Marx Against Them

Even without Nazis, the Russian landscape was antisemitic when Markov and Kvitchko were growing up. Both Jewish, they weren't allowed to attend the universities of their choices. They did manage to go to college, however, and they did manage to get jobs, but not in the professions they'd studied for. It was the late 1970s, and Markov, who grew up in a Ukrainian town called Zaporozhye, intended to be a mathematician. All he could find, however, was a job programming truck routes into a computer at a truck depot in Kharkov, a Ukrainian community with several colleges and "lots of factories," says Markov.

Kharkov was also where Kvitchko had been living all his life, but although the two met once at a conference, they were each otherwise oblivious of the other, both living in a land where free markets and free exchange of ideas were not embraced.

Kvitchko had studied to be a mechanical engineer, but upon graduation, he became a punch-card operator. "It was not a job for [an] engineer," he says. "It was the lowest job you could get."

And Kvitchko never would become a mechanical engineer. He eventually became a computer programmer, and that's where he found the first tremors of his entrepreneurial awakening. "We were never taught entrepreneurship, of course," says Kvitchko, "but I always dreamed about being able to do things on my own." And so he would create programs and give them away to anybody who wanted them. It wasn't true entrepreneurship, but in the 1980s Soviet Union, it was as close as he could get. And dangerously close, as far as the Russian government was concerned. "Even this free distribution I had to do quietly," says Kvitchko. "I could have been suspected of running an illegal private business, and even prosecuted."

Is it any wonder they decided to leave?

This article was originally published in the November 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Marx Against Them.