"Coffin problems" (гробы)
The specific class of oral entrance-exam problems Moscow State University's Mekh-mat faculty is documented to have substituted, unannounced, for applicants it wished to reject — disproportionately Jewish applicants and other "undesirables" — during the 1970s–80s. Nicknamed "coffins" (гробы) or "murderous"/"killer" problems by those who encountered them. The term recurs across every primary source the vault has located on this episode (A. Shen, A. Vershik, Tanya Khovanova, Mark Saul), and its defining feature — repeatedly attested independently — is that the problems have real, findable elementary solutions that are simply very hard to locate under oral-exam pressure, which is what made the mechanism deniable: a rejected applicant had, technically, failed a solvable problem.
References
- claim-mekh-mat-coffin-problems-used-to-fail-jewish-applicants
- claim-khovanova-1975-olympiad-team-recruited-to-solve-smuggled-mekh-mat-coffin-problems
- claim-kanevskii-senderov-1979-data-shows-mekh-mat-admission-gap-despite-jewish-applicants-olympiad-edge
- claim-saul-1999-account-narrates-frenkels-1984-mekh-mat-rejection-and-referral-to-kerosinka
- Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-20-do-primaryscholarly-sources-confirm-that-mekh-mats-coffin.md