The lack of hardware was so acute that when Dmitry won a local Software Olympiad, the work wasn't done on a computer. He wrote algorithms to solve the programming challenges with pen and paper, which the judges scored by hand.
Growing up amidst communism didn't sit well with him. He hated the brainwashing and the way that young kids were made to go into the Young Pioneers, a Boy Scout–like group, to prepare them to become party members when they were older. “By the time you're a teenager you realize nobody really believes in this, everybody's pretending and it's corrupt and just a bunch of bullshit,” he said.
We were sitting at Dmitry's kitchen table as he told me his life story. He'd just been to the gym and we'd gone to get lunch at an enormous grocery store and deli in the basement of his building in a tony part of downtown Toronto. You can see Vitalik inherited his nose from his father. Dmitry keeps his salt and pepper hair short; he is in good shape and has a tattoo across his left bicep. He wore an Ethereum T-shirt with a turtle and dolphin as part of the green and blue logo. He'd picked up a healthy lunch of salmon and steamed vegetables. As he spoke, he collected any crumbs that fell before him on the table in a tissue. By the end of our conversation he'd amassed a small pile of them next to his plate.
It was odd to think that this man, who was basically my age, had a son who had gone on to such prominence. I sat there thinking, my sons are good at Minecraft.
Still, Dmitry knew that all routes to power went through the Communist Party, such as the connections that would help ensure that you could get into the university of your choice. When a teacher advised him to make nice with the Communists so that they couldn't block him from attending the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, he reluctantly went along.
By 1989, Dmitry was 17 and had moved to Moscow to start his first year studying computer science. Two things that he could never have foreseen, however, almost blew him off course: the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and war broke out in Chechnya three years later. It amounted to a double gut punch to his parents, who lost all their savings as Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down and Boris Yeltsin took charge of the rapidly changing country. Then war broke out, and his family was forced to flee Grozny. They sold their apartment for peanuts, their financial ruin sealed in only a matter of a few years. In college in Moscow, Dmitry couldn't count on help from his family. “We had to find some opportunities to feed ourselves,” he said.
Along with a few friends, they devised a plan to buy Russian souvenirs like Matryoshka nesting dolls and anything cheap that sported the sickle and hammer or other USSR symbols. Then they'd make a few trips over the summer to Prague by train and then bus to sell their wares to people who would in turn sell them to Western tourists. The money they made helped them get by for the rest of the year. But perhaps Dmitry's biggest coup at the time came back to his disdain for communism.
Like all members of the Young Communist League he'd been issued an identification badge. This was the precursor to the official party membership badge that would come with adulthood. But in the immediate aftermath of the USSR's fall, an item of this order had become a hot item. He sold his in Prague for five dollars, an enormous sum at the time, considering his monthly student stipend amounted to only a few dollars. Spasiba, tovarich!
But not everything at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering involved scraping by, nations falling apart, and war-torn homelands. He met a girl, Natalia Chistyakova, and fell in love.
Founded at nearly the same time as Moscow, Kolomna is still a wild and beautiful city. It has a fortress and all the churches you'd expect, and when Natalia was a girl she'd race to get her homework done so she could run outside and play until her mother had to yell for her to come home. Her father worked in the military design bureau, her mom in a technical institute. As a six-year-old she spent many days with her mom at the lab, where – like in Grozny 1,800 miles to the south – there were rooms full of computers, each one weighing more than a Chevy.
“Some of my earliest recollections from my childhood are spending time in this lab and printing and using the punch cards and the tape,” she said. These were mainframes that ate stacks of specifically ordered cards with holes punched in them to create a program. Her mom wrote code in Algol and Cobol, staples of the mid-1970s that are still in use today at some of Wall Street's biggest banks. For fun, Natalia would enter random commands to see what the computer would spit out. “We'd print large portraits of Lenin, that was a big amusement for the children,” she said.
She went on to attend the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering, where she first saw Dmitry, whom she calls Dima, amid a group of about 25 people in the gym. They dated throughout university and were married in 1993, when they were both 21 years old. Vitalik was born a year later, and the young family moved into a dorm dedicated to students who were married or had children. Ask Natalia what Vitalik was like as a baby and she'll laugh in the way only a mother can about her child. “We had our hands full, let's put it this way,” she said. As a newborn “he was waking up every 45 seconds.” By the time he was one or two “he was very stubborn and always knew what he wanted to do,” she said. From early on, Vitalik had a sharp memory for what he was taught, remembering the letters of the alphabet or numbers with little effort. He engaged with things so in one sense he was an easy child because she could put a book in his hands and he'd lock in and occupy himself. “I remember the first time he saw a computer, he was fully attached to it. All he wanted to do was bang on the keyboard. He would spend days doing that, just hours,” she said.
Back at university, Dmitry worked full time while still a student to support the family, first as a software engineer at a local bank and then for Arthur Andersen as a computer systems consultant in the Moscow office. After graduation, they moved into an apartment in Moscow and Natalia's parents came to help. Natalia got a job as a finance manager at Heinz. “You know, catsup,” she said.
In the late 1990s the political atmosphere in Russia was changing, as was their marriage. By early 1998, they had separated. “We were really young, we didn't know what we were doing, so that marriage only lasted a few years,” Dmitry said. Natalia had set her sights on moving to Canada, where her plan was to earn a degree at a Canadian school to help her get a good job and settle down in the new country. She attended the University of Alberta for two years while Vitalik lived with her parents in Kolomna.
When Vitalik wasn't running through the forest, stick in hand, or searching out bugs, his grandfather taught him math. He loved Legos and drawing. By the time he was five he was multiplying and dividing three-digit numbers in his head. His parents gave him their old IBM laptop from their university days, which came loaded with Microsoft Office. Excel quickly became his favorite toy, where he learned to draw shapes in the cells and Dmitry taught him to work simple formulas. It was his first exposure to a computer language.
Dmitry left Arthur Andersen in 1997 to help found an enterprise software firm called Columbus with a few former colleagues. They partnered with a Dutch firm to localize the software for the Russian market. But by 1999 the political winds were blowing in a bad direction. “It was clear where Russia was going,” Dmitry said. When he saw Putin rise in prominence, he said to himself, “Really? KGB? I don't think anything good can come from this.” Russia had defaulted on its debt the year before and Dima knew it was time to get out.
By now, it wasn't hard for Natalia to convince Dmitry that he should move to Canada too. At least that way, the family could be close to each other and it would be less disruptive for Vitalik. Natalia came back to Russia to finalize the move for Vitalik, stuff like taking him to the hospital for tests required by Canadian immigration. He walked around the waiting room in Moscow adding and subtracting three-digit numbers out loud. This was one of the first times that Natalia thought her son wasn't just smart, there was something more to him.
“I remember, vividly, Vitalik running around and calling out the numbers, like 200 by 300 and 25 by 350 and so on and so forth, and he'd come up with all the answers,” she said. “He was only five at the
