Sergey Brin: From Moscow to Google

The Boy from Moscow

In 1979, a six-year-old boy left Moscow with his family. His father, a mathematician, had been denied a career in physics because he was Jewish. His mother, a researcher, had faced similar discrimination. The Soviet Union’s antisemitism was not violent in the way the pogroms had been — it was bureaucratic, systematic, and suffocating. Jewish families were denied university positions, promotions, and opportunities. The message was clear: you are not welcome here.

The family settled in Maryland. The boy learned English, excelled in school, and eventually enrolled at Stanford University. His name was Sergey Brin, and he would go on to co-create the most important tool for accessing human knowledge since the printing press.

Childhood and Education

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow to Mikhail and Eugenia Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University. Mikhail had dreamed of becoming an astronomer but was told that Jews could not work at Moscow’s physics department. He became a mathematician instead. Eugenia worked as a researcher at the Soviet Union’s oil and gas institute.

The family applied to emigrate in 1978. Mikhail lost his job immediately — a common punishment for Jews who applied to leave. They waited anxiously for an exit visa while living on savings. In 1979, they received permission and left for the United States.

In Maryland, Mikhail became a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. Eugenia worked as a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Young Sergey thrived in American schools, showing particular aptitude for mathematics and computer science. He attended the Montessori school system, which he and Larry Page later credited with fostering their creative thinking.

Brin graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in computer science and mathematics, then entered Stanford’s PhD program. It was at Stanford, in 1995, that he met Larry Page.

The Google Story

Brin and Page were, by their own account, initially annoyed by each other. But they shared a fascination with the problem of organizing the internet’s rapidly growing information. They developed PageRank, an algorithm that ranked web pages based on how many other pages linked to them — essentially treating each link as a vote of confidence.

The algorithm worked spectacularly well. By 1998, Brin and Page had built a search engine that was clearly superior to everything else available. They incorporated Google (a play on “googol,” the number 1 followed by 100 zeros) in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California.

Google went public on August 19, 2004, with an initial share price of $85. The company’s IPO raised $1.67 billion. Within a few years, Google had become the dominant search engine, the dominant advertising platform, and one of the most valuable companies in history.

Jewish Identity and Values

Brin has spoken frequently about how his family’s experience of Soviet antisemitism shaped his worldview. “I know the value of freedom,” he has said. “My family came to America so that I could have the opportunities that my father was denied.” Google’s founding mission — “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — reflects a deeply Jewish commitment to the democratization of knowledge.

Brin has also been involved in Jewish causes. He has donated to organizations supporting Jewish education and has spoken about the importance of his Jewish heritage. His grandmother’s stories of Soviet antisemitism — of quotas, discrimination, and the constant fear of being identified as Jewish — remain vivid in his memory.

Legacy

Sergey Brin’s story is quintessentially Jewish and quintessentially American: the refugee who found freedom and transformed the world. From a Moscow apartment where his family hid their Jewishness to the helm of one of the most powerful companies on earth, his journey embodies the immigrant narrative that has defined Jewish life in America for generations. Every Google search — billions of them every day — is, in a small way, the legacy of a Jewish boy from Moscow who was given a chance.