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During the 1970s and 1980s, the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics
(Mekh-mat) at Moscow State University used its oral entrance examinations as
an instrument of discrimination: examiners maintained a separate set of much
harder problems — later nicknamed "coffins" (гробы) or "murderous" problems —
and substituted them, unannounced, for applicants the faculty wished to
reject, disproportionately Jewish applicants and others deemed undesirable.
[[entity-a-shen|A. Shen]], a direct participant-witness (Mekh-mat student
from 1974, graduate student 1979–82), documents some two dozen of these
problems verbatim in his 1994 *Mathematical Intelligencer* account — 26
problems in 17 examiner-attributed sets, dated 1974–1989 *(promotion wording:
"roughly twenty"; recounted against the PDF 2026-09-11)* — each
dated and attributed to a named examiner, and states their difficulty was
comparable to All-Union Mathematical Olympiad problems that only a small
fraction of competitors could solve. Crucially, the problems were not
unsolvable — they had elementary solutions that were simply very hard to
find under oral-exam pressure with no warning that a harder tier had been
substituted in. That distinction is what made the mechanism useful: a
rejected applicant had, technically, failed a solvable problem, leaving no
obvious basis for appeal. [[entity-a-vershik|A. Vershik]]'s independently
authored companion piece in the same 1994 issue corroborates the
discriminatory objective directly: the admissions committees' goal "seems
to have been to limit the admission of Jews and members of certain other
national minorities." [[entity-tanya-khovanova|Tanya Khovanova]] (a 1975
Soviet Olympiad team member) and [[entity-mark-saul|Mark Saul]] (*Notices of
the AMS*, 1999) independently confirm the same mechanism from different
vantage points and venues. The practice is documented specifically at
Mekh-mat, though Shen's own reproduced data show comparable admission-rate
disparities at two other Moscow institutes (MIFI, MFTI) in the same years.

This admissions-level mechanism is the institutional counterpart to the
individual-exclusion episode in
[[claim-pontryagin-used-committee-vote-to-help-block-margulis-1978-fields-medal-travel]]:
the same milieu that could bar a Fields Medalist from traveling could also keep
talented students out of the lecture hall in the first place. Such exclusion is
repeatedly named as a political-push driver of the 1970s–80s Jewish-
mathematician emigration wave — the precursor to the 1990s economic-push story
the vault treats in
[[claim-soviet-emigre-career-premium-was-structural-not-ability]] and
[[claim-soviet-scientists-immigration-act-1992-exceptional-ability-waiver]].
See also [[claim-khovanova-1975-olympiad-team-recruited-to-solve-smuggled-mekh-mat-coffin-problems]]
and [[claim-saul-1999-account-narrates-frenkels-1984-mekh-mat-rejection-and-referral-to-kerosinka]]
for the two further independent corroborations, and
[[claim-kanevskii-senderov-1979-data-shows-mekh-mat-admission-gap-despite-jewish-applicants-olympiad-edge]]
for the quantitative admission-rate gap Shen reproduces.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The elegant, awful part of this mechanism is its deniability: an oral exam
> with hard problems looks like rigor, not prejudice, from the outside. That is
> a recurring shape worth watching for — discrimination laundered through a
> procedure that is individually defensible at every step. — Seek

**Correction history.**
- 2026-08-20 — this note originally called the coffin problems "extremely
  hard or effectively unsolvable within the exam," sourced only to a Tier-4
  Wikipedia paraphrase. Four independent Tier-1/2 primaries, read directly
  during this session's promotion (A. Shen 1994, A. Vershik 1994, Tanya
  Khovanova, Mark Saul 1999), uniformly describe the problems as solvable
  but brutally hard to find — the solvability is precisely what made the
  device deniable. The body above is corrected accordingly; the title's
  "deliberately hard" (not "unsolvable") already matched the corrected
  framing and did not need changing. See
  10-inbox/raw/2026-08-20-do-primaryscholarly-sources-confirm-that-mekh-mats-coffin.md
  and the three new claim-notes it produced.