Does Boltyanskii's own 1994 primary account confirm Pesch & Plail's secondary summary of the Pontryagin naming-pressure testimony?
claim-boltyanskii-testimony-locates-pontryagin-naming-convention-in-internal-soviet-pressure rests on Pesch & Plail's 2009 secondary summary of V.G. Boltyanskii's 1994 account (cited by them as "Boltyanskii (1994)"), plus one short translated quote from Boltyanskii's 1969 monograph. This vault has not located or read Boltyanskii's 1994 primary in full. The claim is load-bearing — it is the capture's central finding, answering why the result carries Pontryagin's name alone — and it is surprising enough (a named, dated account of a senior collaborator pressuring a junior one over credit) to need Tier 1–2 sourcing per sources.md's floor for contested historical claims. Right now it clears the floor only at Tier 2, secondhand.
What would resolve this: locating and reading Boltyanskii's own 1994 account directly — the citation Pesch & Plail give as "Boltyanskii (1994)" in their Control and Cybernetics (2009) reference list (https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/970918.pdf, sha 9c020a040ebe80a02bf0b7e5021b39868d245406c26fb8a3607acfa258cbd13f) is the starting point for the full citation. Confirming the quoted testimony against Boltyanskii's own words would upgrade the claim from Tier 2 to Tier 1 and let the [unverified-secondary] flag drop.
Candidate next moves: pull the exact 1994 citation from Pesch & Plail's reference list; check whether it is a standalone memoir, an interview, or a passage inside a longer work; try Boltyanskii's own later writings (he lived until 2011) for a restatement of the same testimony in his own hand.
Progress, 2026-11-06 (headless promotion session). The full citation is now in hand: V.G. Boltyanskii, "The Maximum Principle — How it came to be?", DFG Schwerpunktprogramm "Anwendungsbezogene Optimierung und Steuerung," Report No. 526, Technische Universität München, 1994 — an internal programme report, not a journal article or monograph. A dedicated search (direct web search by title and report number, TUM's VuFind catalog, WorldCat, K10plus/GVK/B3Kat) found no digitized copy, no library holding record, and no source quoting its contents directly. TUM's own catalog (search.ub.tum.de) returned an Anubis bot-challenge wall rather than content — worth a manual retry or a Wayback Machine attempt before concluding the report is unreachable by any tooling route. One apparent lead (a search-engine summary attributing a citation of "Report No. 526, pp. 1–30" to a Springer article, DOI 10.1007/BF02365017) did not hold up: that article's own reference list, read directly, cites only Boltyanskii's 1969 monograph, not the 1994 report. The report likely survives only in German university libraries or DFG program archives not reachable by this session's tools — a manual library visit or interlibrary loan request is the most plausible next step. Short of that primary, two partial reassurances were found and promoted as their own claim-notes: Pesch & Plail's 2012 retelling of the same testimony restates it closely rather than retreating from it (claim-pesch-plail-2012-retelling-of-boltyanskii-testimony-is-self-consistent-not-independent), and the 2012 paper separately establishes the historians had direct contact with Boltyanskii (and Gamkrelidze) beyond the written report, albeit on a different point (claim-pesch-plail-direct-contact-with-boltyanskii-and-gamkrelidze-beyond-1994-report). Neither is independent primary confirmation. Status remains open.