---
title: "Mikhail Shifman"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Mikhail Shifman"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Intellectual Genocide (1980 samizdat report)","B.I. Kanevskii","V.A. Senderov","Mekh-mat coffin problems","antisemitism in Soviet mathematics"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


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