[15][24] On 9 March 1968, 99 mathematicians signed a letter [ru] against the illegal forced sending of dissident Alexander Esenin-Volpin to a psychiatric hospital.
[29][30][31][32][33] Historian Semyon Charny, an employee of the Memorial human rights research centre, notes that discrimination was originally inherent in the Soviet education system, but was based on class.
"[36] One of the most scandalous areas of this discrimination was the massive denial of admission to the MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics for applicants of Jewish origin.
[30][31][33][37][38][39][40][41][42] Israeli-Swiss author and journalist George Szpiro calls the current rector of Moscow State University Viktor Sadovnichiy (at that time he supervised the work of admissions committees), the dean of the MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics Oleg Lupanov, as well as professor and senior examiner Alexander Mishchenko as the main conductors of the discriminatory policy at the MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics.
They were not designed to test a candidate’s skill but meant to weed out “undesirables”.There were significantly fewer Jews admitted to the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University in 1978 than under the conditions of the Jewish quota of the Russian Empire.
[1] Mathematician and dissident Valery Senderov spoke about the methods by which the administration of the Mechanics and Mathematics Department did not allow Jewish applicants to enter the university.
Special problems were also designed, which had a formal solution within the framework of the school curriculum, but it was impossible to solve them in a reasonable time.
[37][49] Sometimes during oral examinations Jewish applicants were gathered into separate groups, and the auditoriums where they took the exams were called "gas chambers" (Russian: газовые камеры).
[40] Academician Igor Shafarevich, speaking about the representation of different nationalities in prestigious areas, wrote about these exams:[52] On the other hand, it must be said by what means these problems were solved until recently - for example, in mathematics.
[53] The problems themselves, offered to Jewish applicants for entrance exams at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, gained fame and became the subject of discussion in the international scientific community.