Lehto reports an unnamed Soviet academician's account that a board of mathematicians, not state authorities, recommended against Margulis's travel permit

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During the 1978 Helsinki Congress, Olli Lehto records that an unnamed Soviet academician told him that Grigory Margulis "was prevented from coming to Helsinki not by state authorities, but by a board of mathematicians that recommended that he not be granted the required permit" (Mathematics Without Borders, p. 206). This is a second-hand account — Lehto reports what he was personally told, not a document he read — and the source is unnamed, so it carries the same evidentiary weight as an anonymous oral-history recollection: solid for the fact that this account circulated among Soviet mathematicians at the time, weaker as confirmation of the mechanism itself.

It is a genuinely distinct claim from claim-pontryagin-used-committee-vote-to-help-block-margulis-1978-fields-medal-travel, which rests on Sergei Novikov's memoir for a specific "24-member Soviet National Committee, 24:0 vote" mechanism. "A board of mathematicians" could be the same body under a looser description, a different body entirely (e.g. a mekh-mat or Academy panel), or an imprecise rumor — the account does not specify. Its most useful role is as a second, independent-of-Novikov voice naming mathematicians rather than state authorities as the proximate blockers, which is the same reframing Novikov's memoir argues for. Routed to the open mechanism question, question-verify-novikov-pontryagin-margulis-fields-medal-block, rather than treated as confirmation on its own.