---
title: "Can 1979 Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group Document No. 112 ('Discrimination against Jews entering the university') be located and read, to confirm it — not 'Intellectual Genocide' — is the true source of the Mekh-mat 47-vs-40 admission table?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["history-of-mathematics","soviet-union","antisemitism","academia","mekh-mat","verification"]
---


[[claim-kanevskii-senderov-1979-data-shows-mekh-mat-admission-gap-despite-jewish-applicants-olympiad-edge]] rests on a 47-vs-40 admission-rate table that this vault had attributed, since 2026-08-20, to Kanevskii and Senderov's samizdat report "Intellectual Genocide" (1980). Having now located and read "Intellectual Genocide" directly (see [[claim-intellectual-genocide-1980-report-located-as-2005-reconstructed-translation]]), that attribution does not hold: the document itself states no Mekh-mat table was compiled in 1980, and its group tables cover only MIFI and MFTI (see [[claim-mekh-mat-47-vs-40-table-not-in-intellectual-genocide-1980-origin-likely-document-112]]). Both [[entity-a-shen|A. Shen]]'s own framing and "Intellectual Genocide's" own internal citation point instead to a 1979 document — No. 112 of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group, "Discrimination against Jews entering the university," signed by Elena Bonner, S. Kallistratova, I. Kovalev, M. Landa, N. Meiman, T. Osipova, and Yu. Yarym-Ageev — as the vehicle that carried "the statistical data collected by B.I. Kanevskii and V.A. Senderov." This document has not itself been located or read by this vault.

**Why it matters.** This is now the specific, narrower gap behind the vault's central Mekh-mat admission-gap figure. The number itself has not been contradicted by anything found this session — MFTI matched exactly, MIFI matched on 3 of 4 digits with the fourth resolved in the primary's favor — but the citation pointing at "Intellectual Genocide" as its source is now known to be wrong, and the corrected citation (Document No. 112) is itself unverified. A load-bearing quantitative claim should not rest indefinitely on an inferred attribution.

**What would answer it:**

1. Search for Document No. 112 itself, or a reprint/scan of it — candidate leads: the Moscow Helsinki Group's own archival holdings, Memorial's archive (Moscow), the Open Society Archives at Central European University (Budapest) — the same three archives Shifman successfully used to reconstruct "Intellectual Genocide."
2. A related, later Kanevskii/Senderov/Meiman/Freiman compilation — "Results of Admission of Graduates of Five Moscow Schools to the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow University in 1981" — is also held at the Open Society Archives per Shifman's bibliography; worth checking whether it reproduces or restates the 1979/1980 Mekh-mat figures even if Document No. 112 itself cannot be found.
3. If genuinely unrecoverable, note that explicitly — the 47-vs-40 figure would then rest permanently on Shen's secondhand transmission, which should stay flagged `[unverified-quant]` rather than have the flag quietly forgotten now that a different, adjacent document has been found.

**Progress, 2026-08-22.** Partially answered — leaving open. Document No. 112 itself was still not located or read, but three sources independent of both Shen and "Intellectual Genocide" now corroborate it from the outside: *A Chronicle of Current Events* No. 55 (1979) titles it specifically as concerning Jewish admission to Mekh-mat ([[claim-chronicle-55-document-112-title-specific-to-mekh-mat-jewish-admissions]]); its No. 56 corrigenda (1980) names B.I. Kanevsky and V.A. Senderov directly as authors of the six-school Mekh-mat enrolment compilation Document 112 reported on ([[claim-chronicle-56-corrigenda-names-kanevsky-senderov-document-112-source-authors]]) — the strongest single corroboration found so far, since its author had no reason to know or care about this vault's question; and a 1981 CSCE survey built from Lyudmila Alekseeva's own Moscow Helsinki Group materials independently confirms the same subject ([[claim-csce-1981-survey-corroborates-document-112-subject-independent-of-chronicle]]). None of the three reproduces Document 112's own text or shows the 47-vs-40 figures printed inside it. Item 1 above (Memorial/OSA/Bremen archives) and item 2 (Chronicle No. 53, p. 184, where the underlying "Results of the Enrolment... from Six Moscow Schools" compilation was first noted) remain the live leads to full confirmation.