You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein: Adventures and Misadventures of Young Mathematicians, or Test Your Skills i
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his book is devoted to an episode in the history of Soviet mathematics, namely the discrimination against Jewish students at the entrance examinations for admission to elite Soviet universities, in particular the flagship university of the country, Moscow State University (MGU). The time span is about two decades, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Since the reader of this review might be unfamiliar with this story, I shall describe the historical context first. Before I begin, let me mention that I have first-hand familiarity with the events and circumstances described in this book: I grew up in Moscow, and in 1973, I was on the receiving end of the admissions policies at the Department of Mathematics of MGU (Mekh-Mat) when I took the entrance exams. I have known many talented young people who had similar experiences; some of them ‘‘made it’’ in spite of all the obstacles, including one who has been honored with the Wolf Prize in mathematics and election to the United States National Academy of Sciences, but many abandoned their dream of becoming a mathematician and had to choose other career paths. The damage done to our profession and to individual lives was substantial. Here is a very brief historical account. In the Russian Empire, there were severe restrictions on admission to universities for its Jewish citizens. In the late nineteenth century, Jews were allowed to occupy at most 10% of the university places within the pale of settlement (the western
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part of the country where permanent residency was allowed for Jews), while the numbers were 3% in the capital cities and 5% in the rest of the empire. The definition of Jewishness was purely religious then. The revolution of 1917 repealed those restrictions, but they were soon replaced by another kind of discrimination, this time based on social background: admission of the descendants of the ‘‘exploiting classes’’ (nobility and landowners, business owners and entrepreneurs big and small, merchants, clergy, and intelligentsia) and their family members was severely restricted. The next change came in the mid 1940s. Ironically, after the victory over Nazi Germany, a rabid anti-Semitic campaign began in the Soviet Union (the pejorative euphemism used for Jews was then ‘‘rootless cosmopolitans’’).1 This campaign abruptly ended with Stalin’s death in 1953. What followed was a short period of liberalization known as the thaw. However, in the mid-1960s, the political situation in the country began to change again for the worse (the official name of this stage was ‘‘real socialism’’). In particular, it brought back anti-Semitic policies that unlike those of the Russian Empire, were unwritten and did not officially exist. That was the beginning of the period described in Comrade Einstein. The end of this period came with Gorbachev’s perestroika and the liberalization of Soviet society in the late 1980s. The reader may be wondering how the college admissions system worked in the USSR during this period. To start with, each Soviet citizen had an internal passpor
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