The Silicon Valley of the East: why the former Soviet Union has been a tech talent powerhouse for 70 years

From Soviet math olympiads to Google, WhatsApp, and Telegram: data, stories, and implications of the Silicon Valley of the East, the tech talent forge that was born behind the Iron Curtain.

When I joined PayPal in 2004, I didn’t know that one of the founders of the company I would work for many years had been born in Kyiv. Max Levchin had fled Soviet Ukraine in 1991, and the USSR collapsed while his family was literally in transit: he found himself, as he later told it, a man without a country, holding a red passport that no longer opened any border. He arrived in Chicago with 600 dollars in his pocket, to be shared among five people.

Years later, looking at the list of big names in technology, that story stopped feeling like an exception. Sergey Brin (Google), Jan Koum (WhatsApp), and Pavel Durov (Telegram), the founders of Grammarly: behind a surprising number of products we use every day, there is a biography that begins behind the Iron Curtain. I asked myself why, and I went looking for the data.

A forge born of the Cold War

The answer begins long before the internet. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union needed technical excellence to keep up with the arms race against the United States. The strategy was systematic: math olympiads organized across the country, specialized physics and mathematics schools opened in major cities, and a cult of scientific education that began in primary school.

The result was a culture of mathematical problem solving that had no equal. The USSR was among the founders of the International Olympiad in Informatics for students and hosted its second edition in 1990, one year before dissolving. And a couple of gems of computing history: Tetris was born in 1984 in the laboratories of the Moscow Academy of Sciences, created by Alexey Pajitnov, while as early as 1958 the Soviets had built the Setun, the only ternary computer ever mass-produced.

What the numbers say today

That tradition did not dissolve with the Soviet Union. HackerRank’s analysis of more than 1.5 million developers worldwide tells a clear story: Russia ranks second overall for talent, and first in algorithms, the most competitive arena. The United States, with its entire ecosystem, ranks twenty-eighth. India thirty-first.

And the phenomenon spans the entire former Soviet sphere of influence: Poland ranks third overall, with Hungary, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Romania consistently in the top 20. Poland has won the Google Code Jam twice, and the world university programming championships (ICPC) have been speaking rather good Russian for decades.

There is also a direct thread between these competitions and entrepreneurship: Andrei Lopatin, twice an ICPC champion, won as a teammate of Nikolai Durov, who together with his brother Pavel would go on to found VK and Telegram. From the olympiads to global products, the step is shorter than it seems.

The diaspora that built Silicon Valley

The paradox is that much of this talent flourished elsewhere. The stories of the three most famous names have a lot in common, including the reason for leaving: Soviet antisemitism.

Sergey Brin’s family left Moscow in 1979 because his father, a mathematician, had been barred from studying physics for being Jewish. Jan Koum arrived in California at 16 from a village near Kyiv, and he has said that the idea for WhatsApp was born partly from the memory of how hard and expensive it was, as an immigrant, to stay in touch with relatives in Ukraine. Levchin, as I mentioned, arrived in Chicago as a refugee and learned American English by watching sitcoms on a TV rescued from a dumpster and repaired at home.

Three biographies, three companies that changed the way we search, communicate, and pay. And behind them, thousands of engineers with similar stories.

The diaspora also has a European chapter, in an industry I know well from having worked in it: fintech. Revolut, today Europe’s most valuable private technology company with a 75 billion dollar valuation and more than 50 million customers, was founded in London by Nik Storonsky, a Russian with a physics degree from Moscow’s MIPT, one of the temples of Soviet scientific education, and Vlad Yatsenko, a Ukrainian who as a student ran his university’s computer lab just to be able to use a computer and access the internet. A Russian and a Ukrainian, together: after the 2022 invasion, the former renounced his Russian citizenship, the latter took a public stand against the war.

Three destinies after 1991

What happened, instead, in the countries that stayed behind? Thirty years after the dissolution of the USSR, three models tell three very different outcomes of the same legacy.

Estonia, the virtuous laboratory

In 1991, Estonia emerged from Soviet occupation with a GDP per capita one-tenth of Germany’s. Today, it has more unicorns per capita than almost any other country in the world. In between lie deliberate choices: the Tiger’s Leap program of 1996 to invest in digital infrastructure, internet access declared a human right in 2000, and above all, Skype. When the company was acquired, its founders and early employees reinvested capital and experience in the local ecosystem: the so-called Skype mafia went on to generate Wise, Bolt, and Pipedrive. The Estonian lesson: the talent was already there, freedom and the right institutions multiplied it.

Ukraine, resilience as proof

Ukraine’s IT sector reached $7.85 billion in 2025, amid a full-scale war. It accounts for 41.6% of the country’s service exports and, counting adjacent industries, supports more than 800,000 jobs: roughly one in ten across Ukraine. And we are talking about products, not just outsourcing: Grammarly, founded by Ukrainians Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko, is valued at $ 13 billion. I told the story of how localization has changed over 25 years in another article: Ukraine has long been one of the quiet engines of that world, and it still is, under the bombs.

Russia, the emptying forge

The third destiny is the most bitter. According to Russia’s minister for digital development, around 100,000 IT specialists left Russia in 2022 alone, after the invasion of Ukraine. An academic study based on GitHub data added a striking detail: those who left were, on average, more active and more central in the collaboration network than those who stayed. The best ones are left, and you can see where: local developers grew by 42% in Armenia, 60% in Cyprus, 94% in Georgia. The forge keeps producing talent, but the talent doesn’t stay.

What the Soviet arc teaches us

The first lesson is about education. The Soviet system invested in pure mathematics, physics, and abstract reasoning skills. No bootcamps, no framework of the moment: foundations. And it is the same conclusion I reach when I look at why AI is now calling for philosophers and humanists: when technology changes every six months, deep education beats purely applied training, because it teaches you how to think rather than how to use a tool.

The second lesson is about freedom. A closed system can produce technical excellence, but that excellence only flourishes where it finds economic and political freedom: in California for the generation of Brin and Levchin, in Tallinn for the Skype generation, and today in Yerevan, Tbilisi, and Warsaw for those leaving Moscow. Talent is cultivated through education, but it is harvested through institutions.

The third is about hiring. If you are looking for developers, you already know where to look: the data on the quality of Eastern European talent is unambiguous, and the new diaspora has redrawn the map. Armenia, Georgia, Poland, and the Baltic states now concentrate a density of skills that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

The irony of fate is all here: a system built to beat the West ended up giving it its best engineers. And Silicon Valley, the real one, in Palo Alto and even in London, speaks Russian and Ukrainian far more than its official narrative lets on.

The tech talents from the East