Google Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin pushed the Internet giant to take the risky step of abandoning its China-based search engine as that country's efforts to censor the Web and suppress dissidents smacked of the "totalitarianism" of his youth in the Soviet Union.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Brin, who came to the U.S. from Russia at the age of 6 in 1979, said the compromises to do business in the world's largest Internet market had become too great. Finally, a cyberattack that the company traced to Chinese hackers, which stole some of Google's proprietary computer code and attempted to spy on Chinese activists' emails, was the "straw that broke the camel's back."

China has "made great strides against poverty and whatnot," Mr. Brin said. "But nevertheless, in some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling."

Mr. Brin reluctantly agreed four years ago to launch a search engine in China that the company would censor to satisfy the government. But he said he began to have a change of heart after the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

As the glow of the Olympics faded, he said, the Chinese government began ratcheting up its Web censoring and interfering more with Google's operations. Around that time, he said, the murky rules of doing business in China grew even murkier. Executives throughout the company grew more anxious about the policy, he said.