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."
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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?
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