Igor P. Lipovsky was born March 7, 1950, in Moscow, in an interfaith Russian-Jewish family. His paternal ancestors were prominent leaders and philanthropists of the Jewish community of Minsk, Belarus, while his mother (nee Robinson) descended from the Russian-English family of well-known industrialists and merchants in pre-revolutionary Russia. Lipovsky graduated with distinction from Moscow Lomonosov State University. He then worked as a researcher and doctoral student at Academy of Sciences, in Moscow. Because of his criticism of the totalitarian and anti-Semitic regime in the Soviet Union,