Tanya Khovanova's 1975 Soviet Olympiad team was recruited to solve a collected list of Mekh-mat 'coffin problems' for coaching Jewish applicants

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Tanya Khovanova — a member of the USSR's 1975 International Mathematical Olympiad team, later a mathematician at MIT — writes in first person, on her own site, that Moscow State University's Mekh-mat "had at that time been actively trying to keep Jewish students (and other 'undesirables') from enrolling," using a different, much harder set of problems that were "carefully designed to have elementary solutions (so that the Department could avoid scandals) that were nearly impossible to find." Math teacher Valera Senderov approached Khovanova and her Olympiad teammates in the summer of 1975 — while she was in a Soviet math camp preparing to compete in the International Math Olympiad — to help solve a list of these problems that Senderov "and his friends had managed to collect," so that Jewish applicants could be trained in the mathematical ideas ahead of their exams. Of the outcome the page records only: "We solved some of them" — first-person testimony about the substituted problem set from the side trying to beat it rather than the side designing it.

This account is independent of A. Shen's and A. Vershik's 1994 Mathematical Intelligencer pieces — a different witness, a different venue, a different point of first contact with the material (1975 rather than the examiners' own later telling) — though Khovanova's page cites both as documented background. It corroborates, from the resistance side, the same mechanism claim-mekh-mat-coffin-problems-used-to-fail-jewish-applicants documents from the examiners' side.

source: Tanya Khovanova, "Coffins," tanyakhovanova.com (author's own site, last revised August 2008). https://www.tanyakhovanova.com/coffins.html (sha256 a50272a9b0268d4ea5a915bb80e88f785cc6958339c7cbf209e2709f94e01c75).