Moscow State University's Mekh-mat used deliberately hard "coffin problems" in oral entrance exams to fail Jewish and other undesired applicants
During the 1970s and 1980s, the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics (Mekh-mat) at Moscow State University used its oral entrance examinations as an instrument of discrimination: examiners maintained a separate set of much harder problems — later nicknamed "coffins" (гробы) or "murderous" problems — and substituted them, unannounced, for applicants the faculty wished to reject, disproportionately Jewish applicants and others deemed undesirable. A. Shen, a direct participant-witness (Mekh-mat student from 1974, graduate student 1979–82), documents some two dozen of these problems verbatim in his 1994 Mathematical Intelligencer account — 26 problems in 17 examiner-attributed sets, dated 1974–1989 (promotion wording: "roughly twenty"; recounted against the PDF 2026-09-11) — each dated and attributed to a named examiner, and states their difficulty was comparable to All-Union Mathematical Olympiad problems that only a small fraction of competitors could solve. Crucially, the problems were not unsolvable — they had elementary solutions that were simply very hard to find under oral-exam pressure with no warning that a harder tier had been substituted in. That distinction is what made the mechanism useful: a rejected applicant had, technically, failed a solvable problem, leaving no obvious basis for appeal. A. Vershik's independently authored companion piece in the same 1994 issue corroborates the discriminatory objective directly: the admissions committees' goal "seems to have been to limit the admission of Jews and members of certain other national minorities." Tanya Khovanova (a 1975 Soviet Olympiad team member) and Mark Saul (Notices of the AMS, 1999) independently confirm the same mechanism from different vantage points and venues. The practice is documented specifically at Mekh-mat, though Shen's own reproduced data show comparable admission-rate disparities at two other Moscow institutes (MIFI, MFTI) in the same years.
This admissions-level mechanism is the institutional counterpart to the individual-exclusion episode in claim-pontryagin-used-committee-vote-to-help-block-margulis-1978-fields-medal-travel: the same milieu that could bar a Fields Medalist from traveling could also keep talented students out of the lecture hall in the first place. Such exclusion is repeatedly named as a political-push driver of the 1970s–80s Jewish- mathematician emigration wave — the precursor to the 1990s economic-push story the vault treats in claim-soviet-emigre-career-premium-was-structural-not-ability and claim-soviet-scientists-immigration-act-1992-exceptional-ability-waiver. See also claim-khovanova-1975-olympiad-team-recruited-to-solve-smuggled-mekh-mat-coffin-problems and claim-saul-1999-account-narrates-frenkels-1984-mekh-mat-rejection-and-referral-to-kerosinka for the two further independent corroborations, and claim-kanevskii-senderov-1979-data-shows-mekh-mat-admission-gap-despite-jewish-applicants-olympiad-edge for the quantitative admission-rate gap Shen reproduces.
Correction history.
- 2026-08-20 — this note originally called the coffin problems "extremely hard or effectively unsolvable within the exam," sourced only to a Tier-4 Wikipedia paraphrase. Four independent Tier-1/2 primaries, read directly during this session's promotion (A. Shen 1994, A. Vershik 1994, Tanya Khovanova, Mark Saul 1999), uniformly describe the problems as solvable but brutally hard to find — the solvability is precisely what made the device deniable. The body above is corrected accordingly; the title's "deliberately hard" (not "unsolvable") already matched the corrected framing and did not need changing. See 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-20-do-primaryscholarly-sources-confirm-that-mekh-mats-coffin.md and the three new claim-notes it produced.