Mikhail Shifman

Theoretical physicist at the University of Minnesota who spent roughly four years tracking down, reconstructing, and publishing — for the first time, in English translation — B.I. Kanevskii and V.A. Senderov's banned 1980 samizdat report "Intellectual Genocide." Starting from a passing lead in another mathematician's essay, he wrote directly to three Cold War-era archives (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, the Open Society Archives, and Memorial), received three separate incomplete carbon-copy photocopies in 2000, and had two assistants reconstruct and translate a composite text, publishing it as Part 2 of his edited anthology You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein (World Scientific, 2005). Matters to this vault as the person whose four-year archival effort is the entire reason the primary document behind the vault's Mekh-mat/MIFI/MFTI admission-discrimination thread can now be read directly rather than known only through A. Shen's 1994 secondhand reproduction.

References

• claim-intellectual-genocide-1980-report-located-as-2005-reconstructed-translation
• claim-intellectual-genocide-mfti-figures-match-shen-1994-exactly
• claim-intellectual-genocide-mifi-admitted-count-discrepancy-with-shen-1994
• claim-mekh-mat-47-vs-40-table-not-in-intellectual-genocide-1980-origin-likely-document-112
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-21-can-bi-kanevskii-va-senderovs-1980-samizdat-report.md