Forbes about Prime Minister of Russia Vladimir Putin: 

“Prime Minister might as well be known as Czar, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russians. Vastly more powerful than his handpicked head-of-state, President Dmitry Medvedev. Presides over one-ninth of Earth’s land area, vast energy and mineral resources. Former KGB officer unafraid to wield his power; invading Georgia, cutting off natural gas supplies to Ukraine or Western Europe (again). Declared nuclear power has veto on U.N.’s Security Council. The anti-Obama: “I’m deeply convinced that constant change is not for the better.”

Did you know that founder of Google was born in Russia? Neither did I. Shame on me! So I “googled” the founder of google and that what I found.

“I think, if anything, I feel like I have gotten a gift by being in the States rather than growing up in Russia. . . . It just make me appreciate my life that much more.” Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin (born August 21, 1973) is a Russian-born American computer scientist^[5] best known as the co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest Internet company, based on its search engine and online advertising technology.^[6] As of 2009, Forbesranks Brin as the 26th richest person in the world.^[3]

Brin immigrated to the United States at the age of six. Earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, he followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, whom he quickly befriended. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.

Childhood in the Soviet Union

In 1979, when Brin was six, his family felt compelled to immigrate to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, author of The Google Story,^[10] Sergey’s father explains how he was “forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college. Officially, anti-Semitism didn’t exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities. Jews were excluded from the physics departments, in particular…” Michael Brin therefore changed his major to mathematics where he received nearly straight A’s. However, he said, “Nobody would even consider me forgraduate school because I was Jewish.”^[11] The Brin family lived in a small, three-room, 350 square foot apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey’s paternal grandmother.^[11] Sergey told Malseed, “I’ve known for a long time that my father wasn’t able to pursue the career he wanted,” but Sergey only picked up the details years later after they had settled in America. He learned how, in 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. “We cannot stay here any more,” he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to “mingle freely with colleagues from theUnited States, France, England and Germany, and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were ‘not monsters.’” He added, “I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave…”.