Kanevskii & Senderov's 1980 samizdat report 'Intellectual Genocide' survives only as a 2005 reconstructed English translation; the Russian original remains unpublished

history-of-mathematicssoviet-unionantisemitismacademiamekh-matprimary-source-verification

B.I. Kanevskii and V.A. Senderov's 1980 underground report "Intellectual Genocide: Entrance Examinations for Jews at MGU, MFTI, MIFI" — previously known to this vault only through A. Shen's 1994 secondhand reproduction of one of its tables — has been located and read directly. Physicist Mikhail Shifman reached it in a single year, and spent four more turning it into a book. Starting from a lead in Ilan Vardi's essay, which arrived as a gift in spring 2000, he found "only marginal mentions" via search engines and wrote to archives directly. In autumn 2000 he received photocopies from three separate institutions (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa at Universität Bremen, the Open Society Archives at Central European University in Budapest, and the Memorial Archive in Moscow), "none of them complete, all taken from typewritten n-th carbon copy of distinct originals." Two assistants, Nodira Dadabayeva and Alexei Kobrinskii, reconstructed a composite text from the three partial copies and translated it into English. It appears, billed as its first publication, as Part 2 of Shifman's edited anthology You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein (World Scientific, 2005).

The Russian original itself has never been published: a 2012 retrospective in Troitsky Variant — Nauka, co-authored by Shifman with Boris Kanevsky and Konstantin Sonin, states plainly, "Статья «Интеллектуальный геноцид» по-русски не опубликована" ("The article 'Intellectual Genocide' has not been published in Russian"), and Shifman's 2005 bibliography notes the full Russian text "can be obtained from B. Kanevsky," who holds a private samizdat archive. What this vault can now cite directly is a reconstructed English translation, one editorial step removed from the underground typescript — a meaningfully stronger source than a secondhand table reproduction, but not the raw original.

source: M. Shifman (ed.), You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein (World Scientific, 2005), "From the Editor," pp. 5–11. https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~shifman/EinsteinBook.pdf (sha256 f57a824b9c30b8c0287b40883ee7d8191586d6d5209a78bc379a1e195069749b).