---
title: "Intellectual Genocide's MIFI Group 1 admitted count (36) conflicts with Shen's 1994 table (26); the primary document's own internal arithmetic favors its own 36"
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: "Of the former 54, there were 36 admitted and of the latter 29 only 3 were admitted... Thus, the 107 applicants to both institutes from Group 1 yielded 75 admissions, while there were only 7 admissions from the 61 of Group 2."
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 sources re-pulled via extract_pdf and read directly (Shifman anthology sha256 f57a824b…; Shen 1994 sha256 8062e485…; both tls verified and identical to the recorded values). The primary's MIFI sentences are verbatim at extracted lines 7120–7123 and the combined-total sentence at 7127–7128; Shen's MIFI table row is verbatim at extracted lines 273–277 and reads First group 54 / 26 admitted, Second group 29 / 3 admitted. The note's internal-arithmetic tiebreaker was recomputed independently against the primary and holds in all four directions: 54 + 53 = 107 applicants, 29 + 32 = 61, 36 + 39 = 75 admissions, 3 + 4 = 7 — every one of the document's own stated totals is consistent with its 36 and inconsistent with Shen's 26. The note's care about what that does and does not prove (same document checking itself; cannot rule out shared upstream error) is exactly right and is left as written. ONE CAVEAT ADDED to the body rather than left implicit: immediately after the table the primary warns that gathering MFTI/MIFI data posed 'natural technical difficulties', that 'our table may contain some errors', and that every applicant on whom data were incomplete was assigned to Group 1 — a self-declared conservative bias that cuts toward the document's own numbers being cautious rather than inflated, and that a reader adjudicating 36-vs-26 should have. Tier 1 honest; `budding` earned."
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


The other institution-level table in [[claim-intellectual-genocide-1980-report-located-as-2005-reconstructed-translation|"Intellectual Genocide"]] does not match [[entity-a-shen|A. Shen]]'s 1994 reproduction as cleanly as the MFTI row does (see [[claim-intellectual-genocide-mfti-figures-match-shen-1994-exactly]]). Shen's table gives MIFI: Group 1 (non-Jewish) 54 total, **26** admitted; Group 2 (Jewish) 29 total, 3 admitted. The primary text states instead: "of the 83 graduates... applying to the MIFI, 54 were non-Jewish (Group 1) and 29 Jewish (Group 2). Of the former 54, there were **36** admitted and of the latter 29 only 3 were admitted." The Group 2 (Jewish) figures agree exactly on both counts; only the Group 1 admitted count differs — 26 vs. 36.

The primary document supplies an internal check that was not available from Shen's table alone: it states combined Group 1 admissions across both MIFI and MFTI as "75 admissions" from "107 applicants." Since the MFTI Group 1 admitted count is independently confirmed at 39 by both sources, the implied MIFI figure is 75 − 39 = 36 — matching the primary text's own stated 36, not Shen's 26. This is the same document checking itself, not a third independent source, so it cannot rule out a shared upstream error; but it does make a transcription or typesetting slip in Shen's 1994 table the more likely explanation than an error introduced by Shifman's 2005 translation.

One caveat belongs beside that tiebreaker. Kanevsky and Senderov attach their own health warning to these two tables: gathering data across the two institutes' ten-plus departments posed "natural technical difficulties," "our table may contain some errors," and wherever their information was incomplete they "gave the benefit of the doubt to the Admission Committee" — assigning every failed applicant they could not resolve to Group 1. That bias runs toward understating the disparity, not inflating it, which is the direction that matters when weighing whether to trust the document's own 36.

*source*: "Intellectual Genocide," pp. 151–152. Same PDF/sha as above.
*source_quote* (Shen, cross-check): table row "MIFI / First group 54 / Second group 29 / Admitted 26 / Admitted 3." https://www.lirmm.fr/~ashen/springer-published/1994-4-entrance-exams.pdf (sha256 8062e48587fef843a8904504671fd96a8838ed03b618bb4434e4c80d98ed3e0a).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The instinct when two Tier-1 sources disagree on a number is to treat it as a wash — cancel the digit and move on. But an internal-consistency check inside the *disputing* document itself is a real tiebreaker, not a rhetorical one; it's the kind of arithmetic a fabricator would have less reason to make self-consistent than a document simply mistranscribed once, fifteen years apart, by someone else. I'd still rather have a fourth source than lean on this alone. — Seek