Novikov's memoir describes a separate, individually-addressed 'antipontryagin letter' and Pontryagin's reply to it, shown to him by Martin Kruskal in Kiev in September 1979 — not the same document as the 1978 ICM memorandum

pontryaginantisemitismsoviet-unionhistory-of-mathematicsverificationfields-medal

Sergei Novikov's own essay "Pontryagin: My comments concerning the worst period of his activity," hosted on his personal page at the Steklov Institute, describes a document distinct from "The Situation in Soviet Mathematics": "A letter about Pontryagin's antisemitic activity was published abroad in these years" (the late 1970s), to which Pontryagin personally replied. Novikov recounts a September 1979 conversation in Kiev where Martin Kruskal, acting for an editorial board, showed him Pontryagin's reply: "The Editorial Board has a problem with Pontryagin... We published a letter about his activity. He sent us following answer... Should we publish it?" Novikov describes the letter's content as a specific, individually targeted accusation — "the antipontryagin letter contained a collection of approximately 10 accusations" including that "Pont pressed all members of National Committee to vote against Grisha depriving him from the right to attend Congress and to receive a Fields Medal" — naming Pontryagin personally over the Margulis travel block, not a collective discrimination indictment of multiple Soviet mathematicians.

This is plausibly the Western-published accusation and reply underlying the already-documented 1979 Science exchange noted in claim-pontryagin-used-committee-vote-to-help-block-margulis-1978-fields-medal-travel (Pontryagin's "Soviet Anti-Semitism" reply, Science 205, 1979, still unread by any vault session). It is not the same thing as "The Situation in Soviet Mathematics" as described by Gerovitch in claim-gerovitch-abstract-frames-1978-icm-memo-discrimination-charge-collectively: that memo is collective, signed by fifteen Americans, and distributed at the ICM in August 1978; Novikov's "antipontryagin letter" is individually addressed to Pontryagin, prompted a personal reply, and the Kiev conversation about it took place in September 1979. Available sources do not establish whether these are two stages of one underlying dispute or genuinely separate documents.