The Mekh-mat 47-vs-40 admission table is not contained in 'Intellectual Genocide' (1980); its likelier documentary origin is the 1979 Moscow Helsinki Group's Document No. 112

history-of-mathematicssoviet-unionantisemitismacademiainstitutionsmekh-matstatisticsprimary-source-verification

The vault's central Mekh-mat quantitative claim — a 47-student "First group" vs. 40-student "Second group" admission table showing an 85%-vs-15% admission-rate gap — has, since 2026-08-20, been attributed to Kanevskii and Senderov's samizdat report "Intellectual Genocide" (1980). Having now located and read that document directly, this attribution does not hold: discussing the 1980 Mekh-mat cohort specifically, the primary text states plainly that no statistical table was compiled for that institution that year, because the applicant pool was too small for meaningful statistics. It proceeds case-by-case instead (naming individual applicants — Krichevskii, Lavrovskii, Temchin, Vegrina, and others) and never returns to a Mekh-mat summary table. Group totals appear in the document only for MIFI and MFTI, under a heading that opens: "The number of Jewish applicants to the MIFI and MFTI is sufficient [sic] large that an illustrative table can be made." Two details of that section cut the same way. Its table covers the graduates of schools "No. 2, 7, 57, 91, and 179" — five schools, including 91 — whereas the 47-vs-40 Mekh-mat table Shen reproduces is drawn from schools "2, 7, 19, 57, 179, and 444," six schools, including two the 1980 report never touches and excluding one it does. The two tables are not the same survey.

Read closely, Shen's own 1994 article is consistent with this gap: he introduces the 47-vs-40 table not as a quotation from "Intellectual Genocide" but as data "obtained in 1979 by Kanevskii and Senderov," and separately describes a different document — Document No. 112 of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group (1979), "Discrimination against Jews entering the university," signed by E. Bonner and six others — as the vehicle that carried "the statistical data collected by B.I. Kanevskii and V.A. Senderov." "Intellectual Genocide" itself cites this earlier document internally, for its own working definition of "Jew." Shifman's own bibliography lists Document No. 112 as a real and distinct item — "Ye. Bonner et al. Discrimination against Jews Enrolling at Moscow University, 1979, Document # 112 of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group" — held in Kanevsky's private archive. The most parsimonious reading: the Mekh-mat table most likely originates in this 1979 document, not in "Intellectual Genocide" (1980) — but Document No. 112 has not itself been located or read, so this is an inference from two secondary framings, not a confirmed attribution.

One qualification the absence-claim has to carry. The text read is not the underground typescript but the 2005 composite reconstructed from three incomplete carbon copies, and the English version omits at least one table appended to the Russian original. Shifman's editorial introduction, moreover, describes the essay as "based on a study of 87 Moscow high school graduates from six special math schools" — 47 + 40 = 87, from six schools, which is Shen's Mekh-mat table and not anything the translation prints. Either the misattribution reached the anthology's own editor, or something was lost in reconstruction. A direct read of this document cannot tell the two apart, so the finding is strong but not terminal.

source: "Intellectual Genocide," pp. 130–131 and 151. https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~shifman/EinsteinBook.pdf (sha256 f57a824b9c30b8c0287b40883ee7d8191586d6d5209a78bc379a1e195069749b). source_quote (Shen, on the table's likelier origin): "The most detailed data on graduates of mathematical schools were obtained in 1979 by Kanevskii and Senderov." / "In 1979, document #112 of the Moscow group for implementing the Helsinki agreements... Included in this document were the statistical data collected by B.I. Kanevskii and V.A. Senderov." https://www.lirmm.fr/~ashen/springer-published/1994-4-entrance-exams.pdf (sha256 8062e48587fef843a8904504671fd96a8838ed03b618bb4434e4c80d98ed3e0a).