gdn: The U.S. was fortunate
"[Sergey] Brin [co-founder of Google] was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union, to Russian Jewish parents, Yevgenia and Mikhail Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University.[9][10] His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.[1][11][12]
In 1979, when Brin was six years old, his family felt compelled to immigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, co-author of The Google Story,[13] Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college". Mikhail Brin claims Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities, and that Jews were excluded from the physics departments in particular. Mikhail Brin therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A's."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin
"[Sergey] Brin [co-founder of Google] was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union, to Russian Jewish parents, Yevgenia and Mikhail Brin, both graduates of Moscow State University.[9][10] His father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his mother a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.[1][11][12]
In 1979, when Brin was six years old, his family felt compelled to immigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, co-author of The Google Story,[13] Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college". Mikhail Brin claims Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities, and that Jews were excluded from the physics departments in particular. Mikhail Brin therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A's."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin