Personal story

I was born in 1984 in the Soviet Union, in the small city of Solnechnogorsk in the vicinity of Moscow. My dad was a hardware engineer who worked in a team that developed radar for the Soviet anti-ballistic missile defense system and my mom was a worker at a semiconductor manufacturing factory. In 1990 they bought an apartment in the city of Khimki closer to Moscow and we moved there. There was a good school nearby, I had good grades, and once a gymnasium opened in our city in 1994 my mom made sure that I got enrolled there.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a major disaster for my family. Both my parents struggled to find a job that would pay enough to sustain us and at some point we even had to rely on growing our own food in a small piece of farmland still available to our grandparents in Solnechnogorsk. Their skills and experience suddenly became obsolete. Despite that, my mom still saw higher education as the only good road to a decent job and my father kept working on hardware development. He was reading international papers to raise his qualifications, taught me how to solder electric components on PCBs and kept a computer for digital CAD work. That gave me a nice tool to play with and develop my own computer skills. And my mom made sure I got the best education possible. In 1999 I passed exams and got enrolled into the Kolmogorov school in Moscow, arguably the best high school in Russia. Since that moment my own life gradually moved into the Russian capital.

In 2001 I enrolled into Moscow State University (Lomonosov University), one of the top-3 higher education institutions in Russia. I also successfully passed exams and got admitted into Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, another top-tier university, but I saw MSU as a better choice. The next 5 years were absolutely amazing. I studied a bunch of interesting stuff in Mathematics, successfully tried myself as a software engineer, started to earn significant money (ironically as a journalist), visited multiple countries, got many friends and finally rented my own place to live. The Russian economy recovered from the Soviet collapse and was growing rapidly, the income of my parents also went up. We were able to afford a used car and I learned to drive.

In terms of hobbies, I started to do skate skiing and hiking and got interested in photography. I visited several Russian regions with a backpack and a tent, sailed in a kayak to the Arctic White Sea via a river in the taiga forest, saw Lake Baikal in spring, walked the Khibiny and Sayan mountains. Saw a solar eclipse twice. Also played computer games, of course )

After my graduation from university in 2006 I applied for an aspirant position, hoping to write a PhD thesis in Computer Science. That didn't end well. I wrote a decent paper, but got stuck with academic stuff like managing publications, finding recommendations and a place that would agree to judge my paper. By that time I already got a good job as a software developer in Align that was taking most of my time and a PhD title did not matter much in that line of work, so eventually I simply ditched my PhD and concentrated on my professional career development.

In 2009 I married my beautiful partner Liz and we had two great kids in 2012 and 2018. Family is very important to me and I try to be at least as good a father to my kids as my parents were to me. Parenting proved to be a very complex and challenging task ) and I had to cut back on my hobbies considerably, but it was totally worth it.

As part of my work in Align, I travelled many times to Israel and got many friends there. So if you are antisemitic, we won't find a common language. These guys aren't perfect, but they definitely don't deserve all the hate they got.

In 2008-2012 I was involved in political activity in Russia, participating in the organization of elections and protesting their results. I had very high hopes for the future of my country given the history of its progress before, so I got a harsh lesson. I was not arrested, but my wife was seriously frightened, so once our daughter was born I tried to stay away from active participation that could get me in jail. However, I remained vocal in social media and some of my posts and articles were noticed by opposition journals. By 2022 these publications stopped being safe too, with new laws introduced in Russia that could severely punish people for publishing "fake stories", even if they were published prior to 2022. I found it impossible to stay silent about Russian aggression against Ukraine and wanted to avoid supporting this aggression in any way (e.g. by paying taxes to Russia), so in March 2022 we were forced to flee from Russia. I saw Ukrainian refugees from Mariupol on my way out and it is one of my darkest and shameful memories that I was not really able to help them. My own family cursed me for supporting Ukraine. I never felt so weak and powerless in my life, with so many people around supporting the war or saying that it's necessary to stay silent.

We found refuge in Armenia with my family and some other Russian emigrants. Originally I hesitated about whether I wanted to move on from there somewhere else (I got invitations to go into the USA and into Germany), but I found Armenia to be a nice country and Armenians to be amazing people. It has plenty of economic problems and refugees of its own (with tens of thousands fleeing their homes in Azerbaijan in 2022), but it's a democratic nation and it strives to build a better future. Soon I found that I want to help all these people. So here I am, still living there with a permanent residence permit, looking for Armenian citizenship and trying to make a positive impact. My wife established a nice small society for Russian emigrants, we are helping refugees from Azerbaijan and Iran and together we are working to solve the economic problems of Armenia.

Family remains my top priority today. Like my parents before, I'm trying to give my kids the best education I could and fortunately Armenia is a great place for a software developer who can pay for a good school and additional post-school activities. It's also a very safe place to be and a beautiful one. I'm hiking a lot together with my family and seemingly there's no shortage of new places to visit. Armenia is also surprisingly diverse and rich culturally despite its small size. So I don't plan to move anywhere else for a while.