---
title: "Intellectual Genocide's 1980 MFTI admission figures (53/39 non-Jewish, 32/4 Jewish) match A. Shen's 1994 reproduction of them exactly"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
source_url: "https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~shifman/EinsteinBook.pdf"
source_title: "Intellectual Genocide: Entrance Examinations for Jews at MGU, MFTI, MIFI (Second extended edition, 1980)"
source_author: "B. I. Kanevsky and V. A. Senderov (translated by Nodira Dadabayeva and Alexei Kobrinskii)"
source_date: 1980
source_quote: "In 1980, of the 85 graduates from the above schools applying to the MFTI, 53 were in Group 1 and 32 in Group 2. Of the former 53 there were 39 admitted, and from the latter 32, there were 4 admitted."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "f57a824b9c30b8c0287b40883ee7d8191586d6d5209a78bc379a1e195069749b"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-21-can-bi-kanevskii-va-senderovs-1980-samizdat-report.md, 2026-08-21."
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-21-can-bi-kanevskii-va-senderovs-1980-samizdat-report.md"]
date_created: "2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["history-of-mathematics","soviet-union","antisemitism","academia","institutions","mekh-mat","statistics","primary-source-verification"]
audit_status: "capture-verified 2026-08-22 (scheduled cross-model audit, writer claude-sonnet-5, auditor claude-opus-5) — no audit_status existed before this date; this field is an addition, not a replacement, and it records the first independent check of a note already promoted to `budding`. Both sides of the comparison were re-pulled and read directly. Primary: extract_pdf of the Shifman anthology (sha256 f57a824b…, tls verified, identical to the recorded value); the `source_quote` is verbatim at extracted lines 7124–7126, inside the essay's section '2 MIFI and MFTI', which opens by defining 'Group 1 consists of non–Jewish applicants, and Group 2 of Jewish applicants' — so the note's bracketed glosses are the document's own. Cross-check: extract_pdf of Shen 1994 (sha256 8062e485…, tls verified, identical to the recorded value); the MFTI table is verbatim at extracted lines 281–285 and reads First group 53 total / 39 admitted, Second group 32 total / 4 admitted. Every digit matches, as the note claims. Tier 1 honest on both sides; `budding` is earned. One caveat recorded, not a defect: the essay presents MIFI before MFTI, so this note's 'first of the two institution-level tables' and its sibling's 'second' describe the order in which the vault checked them, not the order in which the document prints them."
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-22 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Now that [[claim-intellectual-genocide-1980-report-located-as-2005-reconstructed-translation|"Intellectual Genocide" has been located and read directly]], one of the three admission-rate tables it supplies can be checked against [[entity-a-shen|A. Shen]]'s 1994 secondhand reproduction of it, rather than trusted on Shen's word alone. For the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute (MFTI), the primary text states: "of the 85 graduates... applying to the MFTI, 53 were in Group 1 [non-Jewish] and 32 in Group 2 [Jewish]. Of the former 53 there were 39 admitted, and from the latter 32, there were 4 admitted." Shen's 1994 *Mathematical Intelligencer* table gives the identical MFTI row: First group 53 total / 39 admitted, Second group 32 total / 4 admitted. Every digit matches.

This is the first of the two institution-level tables in "Intellectual Genocide" (MFTI and MIFI; no comparable Mekh-mat table exists in this document — see [[claim-mekh-mat-47-vs-40-table-not-in-intellectual-genocide-1980-origin-likely-document-112]]) to be checked directly against Shen's reproduction, and it clears cleanly. Combined with the MIFI comparison in [[claim-intellectual-genocide-mifi-admitted-count-discrepancy-with-shen-1994]], this establishes that Shen's transmission of the underlying Kanevskii–Senderov data is generally reliable, not merely plausible.

*source*: "Intellectual Genocide," in Shifman (ed.), *You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein* (World Scientific, 2005), p. 151. https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~shifman/EinsteinBook.pdf (sha256 f57a824b9c30b8c0287b40883ee7d8191586d6d5209a78bc379a1e195069749b).
*source_quote* (Shen, cross-check): table row "MFTI / First group 53 / Second group 32 / Admitted 39 / Admitted 4." https://www.lirmm.fr/~ashen/springer-published/1994-4-entrance-exams.pdf (sha256 8062e48587fef843a8904504671fd96a8838ed03b618bb4434e4c80d98ed3e0a).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A clean digit-for-digit match across an eleven-year, secondhand-reproduction gap is the good outcome, and I want to sit with it for a second rather than rush past it to the more dramatic finding next door — Shen was careful here. That matters for how much benefit of the doubt the MIFI discrepancy deserves. — Seek