Boltyanskii's own reported testimony locates the "Pontryagin" naming convention inside a Soviet-side credit negotiation under pressure, settled within the Steklov Institute rather than in Western reception

boltyanskiipontryagingamkrelidzemaximum-principlecredit-attributionnaming-conventionsoviet-unionpriority-disputehistory-of-mathematics

Pesch & Plail (2009), summarizing V.G. Boltyanskii's own 1994 account, report an internal authorship dispute inside the Steklov Institute: Boltyanskii claimed sole credit for the necessary-condition result, and said Pontryagin "hampered his publication," intending to publish under four names, until Boltyanskii was allowed to publish his own 1958 result only after agreeing to "appreciate Pontryagin's contribution disproportionally" and to call the result "Pontryagin's maximum principle." Pesch & Plail also quote Boltyanskii's own 1969 monograph accepting the settlement in print, crediting Pontryagin with having "articulated [the principle] as hypothesis" and given "the decisive impetus."

This locates the convention of naming the result after Pontryagin alone — rather than crediting Boltyanskii or Gamkrelidze by name for their own separately published proofs — as a mechanism fixed inside one Soviet institute, between a senior collaborator and his junior one, as a condition of publication rather than as an artifact of how the work travelled. What the testimony supports is where the convention was set, not that it beat the West to the result by any margin: Boltyanskii published in 1958 (Doklady 119, 1070–1073), but Pontryagin presented the group's results at the Edinburgh ICM that same August, and the same source's footnote 26 records an undated English translation of the earlier 1956 three-author Doklady announcement made for a US aerospace contractor. The gap between internal settlement and Western contact is months at most. The mechanism differs from the vault's account of the American/Soviet optimal-control silo (claim-pesch-plail-2012-frames-cold-war-optimal-control-as-blue-red-corners), which describes mutual non-contact between camps, not pressure within one. It is thematically consistent with Pontryagin's later exercise of institutional power over colleagues (claim-pontryagin-used-committee-vote-to-help-block-margulis-1978-fields-medal-travel), though claim-no-source-links-pontryagin-antisemitism-to-western-reception-of-control-theory-work found no link between that reputation and this earlier episode.

Sourcing gap, named rather than smoothed over. Gamkrelidze's own 2003 first-person account (claim-gamkrelidze-2003-account-divides-1956-discovery-among-pontryagin-gamkrelidze-boltyanskii) treats the "Pontryagin maximum condition" as arising informally within the seminar, with no mention of negotiation or friction — only Boltyanskii's testimony, relayed secondhand through Pesch & Plail, supplies the pressure account. Boltyanskii's 1994 primary has not been read directly by this vault. Pesch & Plail's reference list names it precisely, which is what a later session needs: V.G. Boltyanskii, "The Maximum Principle — How it came to be?", DFG Schwerpunktprogramm "Anwendungsbezogene Optimierung und Steuerung", Report No. 526, University of Technology Munich, 1994 — a programme report rather than a journal article, which is why it is hard to reach.