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 time, and I remember the people sitting there and everyone was looking at him going ‘awww’ and rolling their eyes in amazement.”
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As winter turned to spring in 2000, Vitalik now had two new additions to his life to deal with: his new home in the unfamiliar and sprawling city of Toronto, and Maia, his dad's girlfriend. He moved into their apartment and slowly began acclimating to both.
Maia and Dmitry had met while working together at Arthur Andersen. “It was August 7, 1995,” Maia said. “I have a weird memory for dates.” They moved in together in 1998 after Dmitry separated from Natalia and the talk soon turned to leaving Russia. Maia's mother had emigrated to Canada in 1991 with her 13-year-old brother and she'd been to Montreal and Ottawa many times. When Natalia moved to Edmonton to attend school, all the pieces were in place. Maia had founded Columbus along with Dmitry: all they had to do now was sell the business.
Yet Canada was very different from Russia, and Maia had a precocious six-year-old in her life now. She had to find ways to win him over. She found it fun to introduce him to all sorts of new things, like hamburgers. Vitalik had never had a hamburger in Kolomna. They had a game where they would wrestle and after Vitalik beat her a few times, he said, “You are like a conquered moose.” Her nickname was born. From then on, Vitalik called Maia losik, which roughly translates from Russian as “little moose.”
His creativity and playfulness with language was starting to emerge. When they visited friends in Rochester, Vitalik was given a stuffed dog. He named it Rastopyry, which doesn't translate exactly from the Russian but was understood by Maia and Dmitry to mean that the dog's legs were spread. “It was a completely made-up name, but in our family we still use a lot of words that Vitalik created,” Maia said. “Vitalik is quirky and very unusual and bright and totally creative.”
Vitalik's favorite stuffed animal at the time was a rabbit he'd brought with him from Russia. He'd fallen in love with the creatures and by the time he was seven he'd written a 17-page document called “The Encyclopedia of Bunnies.” It contained jokes and pictures drawn in Excel and scientific assessments, such as a periodic table of various bunny qualities.
From the section titled “Bunnies speed”: