Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the October Revolution of 1917, into a Jewish family. His father, Ruvim (Roman) Abramovich Prigogine, was a chemical engineer who studied at the Imperial Moscow Technical School and owned a soap factory; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist who attended the Moscow Conservatory. In 1921, the factory having been nationalized by the new Soviet regime and the feeling of insecurity rising amidst the civil war, the family left Russia. After a brief period in Lithuania, they went to Germany and settled in Berlin ; 8 years later, due to the poor economic situation and the creeping emergence of Nazism, they moved on to Brussels, where Prigogine received Belgian nationality in 1949. His brother Alexandre (1913–1991) became an ornithologist.