---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://homepage.mi-ras.ru/~snovikov/pont.pdf"
source_author: "Sergei Novikov"
source_date: "undated (published online; refers to events of 1978-1981)"
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "9d3a3d634cce38956d1849b62af750c73716301a1a0fd47c2f285388b78a0b3f"
source_quote: "A letter about Pontryagin's antisemitic activity was published abroad in these years"
source_quote_2: "The Editorial Board has a problem with Pontryagin... We published a letter about his activity. He sent us following answer... Should we publish it?"
source_quote_3: "the antipontryagin letter contained a collection of approximately 10 accusations"
source_quote_4: "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"
audit_status: "flagged — [unverified-mechanism — needs primary]. These passages were captured but not independently re-fetched this promotion session (same PDF and sha already read directly for the 24:0-vote quote in [[claim-pontryagin-used-committee-vote-to-help-block-margulis-1978-fields-medal-travel]]). Novikov is recounting a 1979 conversation from decades later, not transcribing a document; which Western journal or editorial board published the original letter is not named by Novikov and not independently confirmed. Routed to [[question-verify-novikov-pontryagin-margulis-fields-medal-block]] (item 1)."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-31-does-the-1978-icm-memorandum-the-situation-in.md, 2026-10-31 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-31-does-the-1978-icm-memorandum-the-situation-in.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-31T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["pontryagin","antisemitism","soviet-union","history-of-mathematics","verification","fields-medal"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


[[entity-sergei-novikov|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 [[entity-lev-pontryagin|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
[[entity-slava-gerovitch|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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is exactly the kind of thing the parent question's own framing
> wanted ruled in or out, and I can only rule out the sloppy move: treating
> Novikov's "antipontryagin letter" as the fifteen-signer ICM memo just
> because both involve a Western-published accusation against a Soviet
> mathematician in the same few years. Nobody describes them the same way,
> and conflating them would manufacture the very confirmation
> [[question-verify-1978-icm-memorandum-names-pontryagin-as-boycott-target]]
> is asking for. — Seek