8 ms·

The Fifth problem: math and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union

141 points by cup 14y ago

patio11 14y ago
I almost prefer honest, outright, mathematically incontradictable racism to the American variety, where considerations favoring a diverse student body counsel holistic evaluation of candidates such that a Goldberg or Tanaka might, despite being a superior student of math, might be less the student the university needs than certain other students
- trhtrsh 14y ago
  patio, You are usually a clear writer, so the contorted structure of your post suggests that you do not feel comfortable saying what you mean, for some reason. There is a difference between "promoting diversity and inclusion of many social/economic/ethnic groups" vs "singling some out for extreme exclusion"
  - patio11 14y ago
    There is no difference between "No Jews in Moscow U!" and "Jews at Harvard but not too many, please" as experienced by the first kid told "no" purely because he was born to the wrong parents. >> the contorted structure of your post suggests that you do not feel comfortable saying what you mean, for some reason. >> No. I am perfectly comfortable in saying "I desire a world in which no university discriminates against any student on the basis of race." The linguistic contortion is a result of accurately repeating the arguments of e.g. Harvard University, because Harvard University desires a world in which some students are discriminated against on basis of race but prefers to lie about that. [Edit: I'm not being unfair to Harvard, by the way. They tiptoe around it quite a bit in their amici briefs, but the Supreme Court will eventually get a little irate if you meticulously avoid saying what you're actually petitioning for, so they have committed on paper to positions like: "[Harvard and the peer institutions signing this brief] accordingly urge the Court to interpret the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to continue to allow educational institutions to structure admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity as single factors within a highly individualized, holistic review process. " Stripped of all euphemism: "We discriminate by race and want to continue doing so. Please don't illegalize that. It would be very inconvenient for us." Arguments advanced as to why it would be inconvenient include "Students perceiving that they were discriminated against, resulting in non-admission, would sue us, and we would not prevail in their lawsuits, because to avoid getting sued to bits for racial discrimination we don't keep objective records of which students we denied for racial reasons versus which were denied for non-racial reasons and we purposely keep our admissions criteria vague and non-objective. Accordingly, illegalizing racial discrimination would cause us to lose suits over some cases where we were not discriminating in addition to those cases where we were discriminating. That's monstrously unfair, don't you think?"]
    - doctorpangloss 14y ago
      I'm not sure that they lie about diversity driven admissions. They state pretty clearly that they actively discriminate students on the basis of race, generally favorably.[0] But that's beside the point. Is Harvard the only place a student can go to school? For Frenkel MGU essentially was. It looks like there are a lot of differences between Harvard and MGU. [0] http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/index.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/index.ht...
      - kryptiskt 14y ago
        > They state pretty clearly that they actively discriminate students on the basis of race, generally favorably.[0] Which is little comfort if you're asian and have to live up to an insane standard to get in.
      - guard-of-terra 14y ago
        I'm not defending МГУ in any way (in fact I'm gonna troll people from there with this article to the rest of our lives), but МГУ is hardly any more unique than Harward in the USA. Moscow had dozens of universities and "institutes" (approximate equvalent of college) and most Jews diverted to one of those after being brickwalled by МГУ. Of course, I consider that the pure mathematics education was a pretty rare thing in USSR which had considerable aptitude towards applied sciences and engineering.
    - calibraxis 14y ago
      I've seen many Black people made to feel inferior by comments like this, which have the result of implying that the reason they probably got in was because a "superior" student didn't. But for one thing, those of privileged races who didn't get in were obviously extremely marginal candidates anyway, who even failed to capitalize on their racial privileges. (And of course, a Black individual who happens to agree with affirmative action is less likely to publicly offer their perspective here, since ironically doing so may hamper their careers, as some future investor or employer googles them. It's much safer to hold the ideology which appeals to these gatekeepers, regardless of skill.) Those who are truly concerned about racism have different criticisms of the (mostly private) system of expensive elite universities, as well as the US imprisoning by far more of its population than any other country. Such things affect education far more than affirmative action ever has. And there are different kinds of affirmative action programs, with different attributes. But such subtleties seem not to matter to those who want to end them in principle.
- yaakov34 14y ago
  I understand your point about honesty being preferable if you're going to discriminate - although I'm not sure if I agree - but why do you think that what Soviet universities did was in any way honest or open? Soviet laws did not allow any discrimination based on origin - there was no dispute about that. (Strangely enough, there is a dispute about whether the US law allows it). So a group of people to carry out the dirty work needed to be selected, and secret directives needed to be given to many others. A variety of subterfuges had to be used - first, to break the blinding on the written exams (typically, they would assign specific seats to Jewish students as they came into the auditorium and gave their names; the exam papers would then be marked in some way when they handed them in; but there were many other stratagems). Then, they'd send grown men to intimidate, bully, and humiliate school students during the oral exam, to try to "bury" them with questions that they couldn't possibly answer, and finally, if they got some uppity gold medalist from the Math Olympiad who would answer them, or someone as strong as Frenkel (who went on to teach at Harvard at age 21), just start lying to their faces. The atmosphere that all this created at MSU and several other institutions was absolutely poisonous. Just the fact of having people in charge who would do all this was demoralizing to the faculty; it was also demoralizing to the students, who could plainly see what was done to their Jewish classmates in the application process, and to all the regular examiners. The application process - which was supposed to be objective in the first place, and not "holistic" - was defiled. The greatest irony of the situation is that the mathematics department of the MGU, whose status was mythological, and which these students believed was so indispensable to them, was not even very good during this period. The curriculum had stagnated since the 1950s, and the research was much weaker than it used to be. Incidentally, the lying goes on to the present day - the MSU has never admitted to anything, let alone apologized. Some words were apparently said to Frenkel and some others in private, but for the most part, everyone involved just plays dumb.
- dasil003 14y ago
  Modern American racism may be more subtle and seemingly intractable, but that is inevitably the case as it lessens over time, political correctness notwithstanding.
- reader5000 14y ago
  Holistic evaluation is legitimate. I'm not sure why people think raw SAT is all that should matter. Universities basically function to stamp kids as "qualified for the middle class". Inasmuch as the USA is increasingly multicultural, it cannot have its university system exclude entire races from the middle class simply because they on average score X points less on the SAT. That's not politically tenable. The underlying problem here is growing population and not proportionally growing seats at brand-name universities. There is really no reason that e.g. Harvard can only produce X number of "Harvard degrees" per year. I realize scarcity is part of its value, but it can still increase production and remain "proportionally scarce". I totally think that admissions councils should strip ethnicity data when considering individual applications (versus the demographics as a whole). But I also think doing so would still result in "discriminatory results" where say the Asian kid with perfect SAT and facility at piano and violin is rejected in favor of the Black kid with a hundred points less than perfect SAT but wrote an eloquent personal statement on how he taught a Kenyan village how to code (or whatever). I don't really like the assumption that SAT should be the sole determination in admissions.
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    Holistic evaluation is legitimate. I'm not sure why people think raw SAT is all that should matter. You don't need to use strictly SAT to have an objective system in which racism is honest. Before Grutter, that's exactly what U-Mich did. They gave you points: 20xGPA + SAT/100 + 1 for a good essay + 1-5 for extracurriculars + etc + 20 if black + 5 if woman in engineering, man in nursing. They only dropped this system after the supreme court said they couldn't use objective systems and be racist at the same time. [edit: Fixed numbers, here is the actual sheet: http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif ]
    - polymatter 14y ago
      Wait, so they had a choice between using an objective system and being racist and they dropped the objective system?
      - 14y ago
- polymatter 14y ago
  I agree. Or perhaps even better than 'mathematically incontradictable' racism (but not quite as good as no racism) is having a more sort of standardised racism. I heard from a Chinese friend of mine that some Chinese universities wanted to increase attendance from non-Han ethnic minorities. They did this by giving them +3% on the entrance exam. This makes it clear racial discrimination, but on a fair and standard basis. Nobody is going to pass the exam just relying on that 3%. But the university gets more minorities accepted than they would otherwise too.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  The issue is that we've (we as in humanity) committed some great injustices that have left certain groups at a major disadvantage. The only viable solution, for now, is to give those groups an unfair advantage at the cost of some efficiency, lost opportunities, "white discrimination" and so on. Hopefully, this strategy may one day level the field enough that it's not needed. Anyway, it's still probably statistically better to be a white male who went to a "less than Harvard" college than a minority from Harvard.
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    Could you explain your moral philosophy in a bit more detail? Specifically, individuals in group A performed injustices back in the 60's and earlier against individuals in group B. Therefore, different individual members of group A (and other unrelated groups [1]) should be discriminated against in favor of different individual members of group B (all of whom were born after the 60's)? So following this logic, should we discriminate against the children/relatives of criminals in favor of the children of crime victims? What if group C disproportionately commits crimes today. Should non-criminal members of group C be discriminated against? Does it matter how group C is defined? I.e., is the statement true if group C is {x : x.race = REFERENCE_RACE}, but false if C is { x : x.ssn % 100 == 3 || x.isCriminal }? I guess my fundamental question is this. You seem to implicitly hold some conception of group rights, and believe that certain groups are worthy of moral consideration. I doubt you believe that all 2^(6 billion) subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration, however. So how do you determine which subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration? [1] I.e., asians should be discriminated against because whites were mean to blacks (and asians) in the past.
    - king_jester 14y ago
      First of all, it should noted that institutional racism and oppression exists and is executed today against people of color, esp. black folks, in the US. Therefore, any examination of policies that seek to address race imbalances need to be considered in this context. Second, crime and race are related in a major way, esp. in regards to institutional systems that keep black folks economically depressed and include them as prison population component of the industrial-prison-complex the US currently runs. I can appreciate you want to abstract these thoughts out, but that is a very difficult exercise. Instead, it is much easier to talk about the actual reality minorities in the US face in regards to political and social systems and how those systems affect their existence. Such systems and policies that continue to keep economic opportunity and education out of the hands of people of color need to be addressed, and a race related policy like affirmative action is just one such tool to address those problems. > I doubt you believe that all 2^(6 billion) subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration, however. So how do you determine which subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration? All members of the human race deserve moral and ethical treatment and consideration. However, many different groups of people in the US are not treated in such a way, both on personal levels and systemically. As a society, different approaches and tools must be employed to correct that mistreatment, and yes that means the most disadvantaged and screwed over people will need tools that empower them and help them to no longer be considered a second- or third-class status in society.
- pdog 14y ago
  Can you clean up your post (if you still have edit capabilities)? It's rather difficult to parse what you're trying to say.
shimon_e 14y ago
“Do you know that Jews are not accepted to Moscow University?” “What do you mean?” “What I mean is that you shouldn’t even bother to apply. Don’t waste your time. They won’t let you in.” How awful.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
cma 14y ago
Harvard penalized Jews in admissions here in the early 20th century by various means, and continues the sick practice today with Asians.
- yen223 14y ago
  This is the first I've heard of this. How does Harvard penalize Asians?
  - anateus 14y ago
    Several admissions officers at Ivy league universities have admitted that because they get so many applications of similar-profile asian-americans (high grades, similar extracuriculars) they hold them to a "higher standard" than similarly-achieving non-asians. This is justified in the name of diversity.
    - doctorpangloss 14y ago
      Are Ivy League universities the only ones a student can apply to for a specific program? Do Ivy League universities have to admit anyone if they don't want to? Do students even have only one choice of public discounted universities? The experience seems pretty distinct.
      - mike_esspe 14y ago
        In USSR jews could go to other universities too (though they were low profile and i think had quotas too, just higher). I don't understand how it justifies the discrimination.
      - praxulus 14y ago
        While it's not as extreme as the the situation described in the article, it's still racism. A restaurant isn't allowed to discriminate based on race, why is a university?
      - jychang 14y ago
tlogan 14y ago
As far as know from my Russian friends raise of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union started in late 1970s / early 1980s. Is that correct? Does anybody know why? Was it because of renewal of Russian nationalism?
- zalew 14y ago
  It started way before WW2 with Stalin's propaganda against Trocki. It rose once again after WW2 on political grounds when Stalin saw the birth of Israel as a threat that the vast jew population now having its own nation (and collaborating with the US) will undermine the integrity of the country. Contrary to Hitler's vision, Stalin's xenophobia wasn't based directly on ethnic grounds per se, it were delusions of a tyrant who slaughters its own people wherever and whenever he sees any political threat. The more modern antisemitic propaganda supposedly appeared under Putin's conflict with Jelcyn's oligarchs. It won't make you feel better, but although anti-semitism is the most 'mainstream' discrimination, Russia is an enormous country full of various ethnic minorities under threat. Take note although I've read a few about Russia, I'm far from an expert on it and it's a really complicated place for me, so you should investigate the issues I mentioned further to get a better view.
  - akiselev 14y ago
    You are correct about the discrimination against many minorities. When it comes to foreign policy, Russia will go to hell and back to protect its people (i.e., South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and the Georgian invasion) but when it comes to internal matters, there is a growing nationalism among the populism. Navalny, for example, is a known supporter of nationalists despite being "Putin's number one enemy" and the most visible opposer to his regime. Furthermore, you'd have to try not to find videos of Russian nationalists murdering minorities on Google and Youtube. Many people who immigrate from the -stan countries are the equivalent of Mexicans in the United States, having faced constant discrimination for taking Russians' jobs (in construction for instance).
    - zalew 14y ago
      -stans imigrants obviously, but I had also in mind the various native tribes of Syberia.
sologoub 14y ago
Interesting read and I've heard similar stories, as well as know one person who got in, but still talks about how terrible it was even after admission... this is of course terrible and blatantly stupid of any nation to discriminate of bright minds on questions of faith or origin... but what does it have to do with Hacker News?
- tzs 14y ago
  "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" This was interesting, as you noted.
yen223 14y ago
This, right here, is an excellent example of why institutionalized racism is a terrible thing. In any other situation, universities would be clamoring to have a student of such calibre study at their institution. But because this man was, heaven forbid, a Jew, they simply couldn't take him in. This comment is mostly pointed at my home country of Malaysia, where "special rights" of members of a certain racial group is enshrined in our freakin constitution![0] [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Malaysia#Article_153_-_Special_Position_of_Bumiputras_and_Legitimate_Interests_of_Other_Communities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Malaysia#Articl...
- edanm 14y ago
  I think there's a good case to be made that the problem with institutionalized racism is terrible not just because society loses out on a great mathematician, but rather, because it hurts individuals by discriminating against them. Just because he turned out to be a great mathematician doesn't make his story any more painful or wrong.
  - yen223 14y ago
    You are absolutely correct. People absolutely do get hurt when they are discriminated against. As a second-class citizen in my country, I truly understand this. The point I was trying to make was that the people doing the discriminating also get hurt in the process, thanks to lost opportunities such as the loss of this mathematician. There's really no benefit whatsoever to promoting irrational discrimination such as racism.
doctorpangloss 14y ago
My mom and dad faced identical problems in the late 70s. I would urge no simple comparisons between elite private U.S. university admissions in 2012 and public Soviet Union university admissions throughout the century. The experience of Jews in the Soviet Union is substantially distinct from the experience of nonwhites in the contemporary United States. Remember: If Harvard wants to, it doesn't have to admit anyone at all. There are lots of universities in America, in fact lots of best ones. There was only one MGU.
- barry-cotter 14y ago
  There's only one Harvard. It's the most prestigious undergraduate university on Earth.
  - gadders 14y ago
    Apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
    - barry-cotter 14y ago
      Hey, I'd prefer to live, study at, or work at Oxford too, or Cambridge, but there is actually only one Harvard. The first sentence of my post is true and was responding to its parent post saying there's only one MSU. Harvard is definitely the most prestigious university in the US, just as Oxford is definitely the most prestigious university in the UK. Please noye I said nothing anout quality of education.
      - gadders 14y ago
        Yeah, I didn't mean one was better than the other, just that any of them on your CV would look equally good. There are probably European and Asian equivalents, (Sorbonne?) but I have no idea what they would be.
        barry-cotter 14y ago
siculars 14y ago
My mothers father had to bribe the admissions board of Moscow U. to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars to let her in. This was in the late 60's/early 70's. Anti-Semitism, but of course. They left as soon as possible for Israel and then America. Honestly, I often think that if Germany and the Soviets had not hated Jews so much the world would be a very different place.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  Which department? Just curious.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  Where did he get tens of thousands of dollars (even if in the Rouble equivalent)? Just curious. Seems to be a sum out of reach of any citizen who is not a miner, a polar worker or engineer-in-chief.
  - rada 14y ago
    I had an almost exact same "forget-it-not-gonna-happen" conversation with an admissions officer at MSU around 1984 (I think). It was suggested to my parents that a substantial bribe would reverse my fortunes. We chose not to apply - I went to my local U instead - but they could have definitely afforded it: they were both high-earners (my dad headed a science lab and my mom was a professor) plus they both made the so-called northern coefficient (basically, 2.5x regular salary for living in Bumf--k Siberia).
  - siculars 14y ago
    Let's just say he was... creative.
lini 14y ago
About a year ago I read a paper that listed a number of those "Jewish Problems" (ambiguous or hard problems given at entrance exams). For those interested - http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
- praptak 14y ago
  They were more than just hard. They were specifically picked for being solvable using relatively easy tools (so as not to give basis for appeal) with solutions being extremely hard to figure out.
mukaiji 14y ago
thank you for your remarkable courage and determination.
kombine 14y ago
> The problem looked innocent enough at first glance: given a circle and two points on the plane outside the circle, construct another circle passing trough those two points and touching the first circle at one point.But the solution is in fact quite complicated. Few of my future colleagues at Harvard and Berkeley would have been able to solve it right away. One must use “inversion,” a concept that was not studied in high school and hence could not possibly be allowed in this exam. I became quite curious about solving this problem, I tried to look up what he means by "inversion" but could not find it. Anyone knows what it could be? Update: Wikipedia suggests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_in_a_point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_in_a_point but obviously this is covered by high school program and is not very complicated.
- dch 14y ago
  The concept he's talking about is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_inversion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_inversion; http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Inversion.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Inversion.html has a bit more detail.
  - kombine 14y ago
    Thanks, and the problem in question is actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_Apollonius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_Apollonius
PRJIUS 14y ago
As a preamble there most definitely existed anti-semitism in Soviet Union. I am a Russian living in the US with Jewish family in Russia. This is a throw away account. With that said, stories of anti-semitism told by Russian Jews in US should not be taken at face value. These folks are subject to a very strong selection bias. Most of them came to the US as refugees who were recognized by the US State Department as being discriminated against for being Jewish in USSR/Russia. Secondly they have interest in maintaining the story anti-seminitism because it validates their narrative and could potentially help their relatives immigrate to the US. Additionally many stories of anti-semitism that I heard were something a non-jew would experience as well but attributed to anti-semitism. As a personal example, I was at first denied admission to a specialized school in very late Soviet period. They eventually let me in because my mother found out that I had the highest score on the entrance exam of any one. Their excuse was that they had to let the kids who were in the paid summer program at the school first and now the class was full. A Jewish kid's parents would have been told they already have too many Jews in the advanced program. Both cases are just the admissions persons asking for a bribe.
JabavuAdams 14y ago
I'm often amazed by the stupidity of our species, but not usually infuriated. Well, I guess that whole global race for talent didn't work out so well for the USSR.
tokenadult 14y ago
I see questions here in the thread about how university selection currently works in the United States. There is quite an exhaustive thread on that subject, "'Race' in College Admission FAQ & Discussion," on the College Confidential discussion site, http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1366406-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-10-a.html http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/13664... and the first few FAQ posts in that thread link out to much official information about current United States policies on the subject, current college practice, and the controlling Supreme Court cases. There is, of course, a case currently before the Supreme Court that may result in a change in the controlling law, and commentary about the pending case is also linked to from that thread. The issue of admission of Jews to United States universities is also discussed there.
rehack 14y ago
wow! what a great read. This article confirms the anti-semitism in USSR, which has been described by several others. I am surprised there is no mention of Grigory Perelman[1] in the discussion here on HN. The genius mathematician who proved PoinCare Conjecture, a problem standing for 100 years. And then later on refused the million dollar prize which was to be awarded for the proof[2]. The reason, this article reminds of Perelman is that he also faced similar kind of discrimination, in the USSR. But it was more subtle in Perelman's case. And he was able to get what he wanted from the USSR system, in terms of going to the university he wanted. Masha Gessen has written a biography on Perelman in her book 'Perfect Rigor'. The book also serves as a commentary on the Russian Math culture (which is very very impressive by the way) and their education system. Now reading this article, I want to read Edward Frenkel's book as well. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman [2] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/24/grigori-perelman-reclusiv_n_511938.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/24/grigori-perelman-re... Edit: typo
ucee054 14y ago
From article: "People of other nationalities, like Tatars and Armenians, against whom there were prejudices and persecution—though not nearly on the same scale as against the Jews" The Soviet Union killed Ukrainians by the millions.

141 points by cup 14y ago

I almost prefer honest, outright, mathematically incontradictable racism to the American variety, where considerations favoring a diverse student body counsel holistic evaluation of candidates such that a Goldberg or Tanaka might, despite being a superior student of math, might be less the student the university needs than certain other students

trhtrsh 14y ago
patio, You are usually a clear writer, so the contorted structure of your post suggests that you do not feel comfortable saying what you mean, for some reason. There is a difference between "promoting diversity and inclusion of many social/economic/ethnic groups" vs "singling some out for extreme exclusion"
- patio11 14y ago
  There is no difference between "No Jews in Moscow U!" and "Jews at Harvard but not too many, please" as experienced by the first kid told "no" purely because he was born to the wrong parents. >> the contorted structure of your post suggests that you do not feel comfortable saying what you mean, for some reason. >> No. I am perfectly comfortable in saying "I desire a world in which no university discriminates against any student on the basis of race." The linguistic contortion is a result of accurately repeating the arguments of e.g. Harvard University, because Harvard University desires a world in which some students are discriminated against on basis of race but prefers to lie about that. [Edit: I'm not being unfair to Harvard, by the way. They tiptoe around it quite a bit in their amici briefs, but the Supreme Court will eventually get a little irate if you meticulously avoid saying what you're actually petitioning for, so they have committed on paper to positions like: "[Harvard and the peer institutions signing this brief] accordingly urge the Court to interpret the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to continue to allow educational institutions to structure admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity as single factors within a highly individualized, holistic review process. " Stripped of all euphemism: "We discriminate by race and want to continue doing so. Please don't illegalize that. It would be very inconvenient for us." Arguments advanced as to why it would be inconvenient include "Students perceiving that they were discriminated against, resulting in non-admission, would sue us, and we would not prevail in their lawsuits, because to avoid getting sued to bits for racial discrimination we don't keep objective records of which students we denied for racial reasons versus which were denied for non-racial reasons and we purposely keep our admissions criteria vague and non-objective. Accordingly, illegalizing racial discrimination would cause us to lose suits over some cases where we were not discriminating in addition to those cases where we were discriminating. That's monstrously unfair, don't you think?"]
  - doctorpangloss 14y ago
    I'm not sure that they lie about diversity driven admissions. They state pretty clearly that they actively discriminate students on the basis of race, generally favorably.[0] But that's beside the point. Is Harvard the only place a student can go to school? For Frenkel MGU essentially was. It looks like there are a lot of differences between Harvard and MGU. [0] http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/index.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/index.ht...
    - kryptiskt 14y ago
      > They state pretty clearly that they actively discriminate students on the basis of race, generally favorably.[0] Which is little comfort if you're asian and have to live up to an insane standard to get in.
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      I'm not defending МГУ in any way (in fact I'm gonna troll people from there with this article to the rest of our lives), but МГУ is hardly any more unique than Harward in the USA. Moscow had dozens of universities and "institutes" (approximate equvalent of college) and most Jews diverted to one of those after being brickwalled by МГУ. Of course, I consider that the pure mathematics education was a pretty rare thing in USSR which had considerable aptitude towards applied sciences and engineering.
  - calibraxis 14y ago
    I've seen many Black people made to feel inferior by comments like this, which have the result of implying that the reason they probably got in was because a "superior" student didn't. But for one thing, those of privileged races who didn't get in were obviously extremely marginal candidates anyway, who even failed to capitalize on their racial privileges. (And of course, a Black individual who happens to agree with affirmative action is less likely to publicly offer their perspective here, since ironically doing so may hamper their careers, as some future investor or employer googles them. It's much safer to hold the ideology which appeals to these gatekeepers, regardless of skill.) Those who are truly concerned about racism have different criticisms of the (mostly private) system of expensive elite universities, as well as the US imprisoning by far more of its population than any other country. Such things affect education far more than affirmative action ever has. And there are different kinds of affirmative action programs, with different attributes. But such subtleties seem not to matter to those who want to end them in principle.
yaakov34 14y ago
I understand your point about honesty being preferable if you're going to discriminate - although I'm not sure if I agree - but why do you think that what Soviet universities did was in any way honest or open? Soviet laws did not allow any discrimination based on origin - there was no dispute about that. (Strangely enough, there is a dispute about whether the US law allows it). So a group of people to carry out the dirty work needed to be selected, and secret directives needed to be given to many others. A variety of subterfuges had to be used - first, to break the blinding on the written exams (typically, they would assign specific seats to Jewish students as they came into the auditorium and gave their names; the exam papers would then be marked in some way when they handed them in; but there were many other stratagems). Then, they'd send grown men to intimidate, bully, and humiliate school students during the oral exam, to try to "bury" them with questions that they couldn't possibly answer, and finally, if they got some uppity gold medalist from the Math Olympiad who would answer them, or someone as strong as Frenkel (who went on to teach at Harvard at age 21), just start lying to their faces. The atmosphere that all this created at MSU and several other institutions was absolutely poisonous. Just the fact of having people in charge who would do all this was demoralizing to the faculty; it was also demoralizing to the students, who could plainly see what was done to their Jewish classmates in the application process, and to all the regular examiners. The application process - which was supposed to be objective in the first place, and not "holistic" - was defiled. The greatest irony of the situation is that the mathematics department of the MGU, whose status was mythological, and which these students believed was so indispensable to them, was not even very good during this period. The curriculum had stagnated since the 1950s, and the research was much weaker than it used to be. Incidentally, the lying goes on to the present day - the MSU has never admitted to anything, let alone apologized. Some words were apparently said to Frenkel and some others in private, but for the most part, everyone involved just plays dumb.
dasil003 14y ago
Modern American racism may be more subtle and seemingly intractable, but that is inevitably the case as it lessens over time, political correctness notwithstanding.
reader5000 14y ago
Holistic evaluation is legitimate. I'm not sure why people think raw SAT is all that should matter. Universities basically function to stamp kids as "qualified for the middle class". Inasmuch as the USA is increasingly multicultural, it cannot have its university system exclude entire races from the middle class simply because they on average score X points less on the SAT. That's not politically tenable. The underlying problem here is growing population and not proportionally growing seats at brand-name universities. There is really no reason that e.g. Harvard can only produce X number of "Harvard degrees" per year. I realize scarcity is part of its value, but it can still increase production and remain "proportionally scarce". I totally think that admissions councils should strip ethnicity data when considering individual applications (versus the demographics as a whole). But I also think doing so would still result in "discriminatory results" where say the Asian kid with perfect SAT and facility at piano and violin is rejected in favor of the Black kid with a hundred points less than perfect SAT but wrote an eloquent personal statement on how he taught a Kenyan village how to code (or whatever). I don't really like the assumption that SAT should be the sole determination in admissions.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  Holistic evaluation is legitimate. I'm not sure why people think raw SAT is all that should matter. You don't need to use strictly SAT to have an objective system in which racism is honest. Before Grutter, that's exactly what U-Mich did. They gave you points: 20xGPA + SAT/100 + 1 for a good essay + 1-5 for extracurriculars + etc + 20 if black + 5 if woman in engineering, man in nursing. They only dropped this system after the supreme court said they couldn't use objective systems and be racist at the same time. [edit: Fixed numbers, here is the actual sheet: http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif ]
  - polymatter 14y ago
    Wait, so they had a choice between using an objective system and being racist and they dropped the objective system?
    - 14y ago
polymatter 14y ago
I agree. Or perhaps even better than 'mathematically incontradictable' racism (but not quite as good as no racism) is having a more sort of standardised racism. I heard from a Chinese friend of mine that some Chinese universities wanted to increase attendance from non-Han ethnic minorities. They did this by giving them +3% on the entrance exam. This makes it clear racial discrimination, but on a fair and standard basis. Nobody is going to pass the exam just relying on that 3%. But the university gets more minorities accepted than they would otherwise too.
flyinRyan 14y ago
The issue is that we've (we as in humanity) committed some great injustices that have left certain groups at a major disadvantage. The only viable solution, for now, is to give those groups an unfair advantage at the cost of some efficiency, lost opportunities, "white discrimination" and so on. Hopefully, this strategy may one day level the field enough that it's not needed. Anyway, it's still probably statistically better to be a white male who went to a "less than Harvard" college than a minority from Harvard.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  Could you explain your moral philosophy in a bit more detail? Specifically, individuals in group A performed injustices back in the 60's and earlier against individuals in group B. Therefore, different individual members of group A (and other unrelated groups [1]) should be discriminated against in favor of different individual members of group B (all of whom were born after the 60's)? So following this logic, should we discriminate against the children/relatives of criminals in favor of the children of crime victims? What if group C disproportionately commits crimes today. Should non-criminal members of group C be discriminated against? Does it matter how group C is defined? I.e., is the statement true if group C is {x : x.race = REFERENCE_RACE}, but false if C is { x : x.ssn % 100 == 3 || x.isCriminal }? I guess my fundamental question is this. You seem to implicitly hold some conception of group rights, and believe that certain groups are worthy of moral consideration. I doubt you believe that all 2^(6 billion) subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration, however. So how do you determine which subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration? [1] I.e., asians should be discriminated against because whites were mean to blacks (and asians) in the past.
  - king_jester 14y ago
    First of all, it should noted that institutional racism and oppression exists and is executed today against people of color, esp. black folks, in the US. Therefore, any examination of policies that seek to address race imbalances need to be considered in this context. Second, crime and race are related in a major way, esp. in regards to institutional systems that keep black folks economically depressed and include them as prison population component of the industrial-prison-complex the US currently runs. I can appreciate you want to abstract these thoughts out, but that is a very difficult exercise. Instead, it is much easier to talk about the actual reality minorities in the US face in regards to political and social systems and how those systems affect their existence. Such systems and policies that continue to keep economic opportunity and education out of the hands of people of color need to be addressed, and a race related policy like affirmative action is just one such tool to address those problems. > I doubt you believe that all 2^(6 billion) subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration, however. So how do you determine which subsets of humanity are worthy of moral consideration? All members of the human race deserve moral and ethical treatment and consideration. However, many different groups of people in the US are not treated in such a way, both on personal levels and systemically. As a society, different approaches and tools must be employed to correct that mistreatment, and yes that means the most disadvantaged and screwed over people will need tools that empower them and help them to no longer be considered a second- or third-class status in society.
pdog 14y ago
Can you clean up your post (if you still have edit capabilities)? It's rather difficult to parse what you're trying to say.

shimon_e 14y ago

“Do you know that Jews are not accepted to Moscow University?” “What do you mean?” “What I mean is that you shouldn’t even bother to apply. Don’t waste your time. They won’t let you in.” How awful.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

cma 14y ago

Harvard penalized Jews in admissions here in the early 20th century by various means, and continues the sick practice today with Asians.

yen223 14y ago
This is the first I've heard of this. How does Harvard penalize Asians?
- anateus 14y ago
  Several admissions officers at Ivy league universities have admitted that because they get so many applications of similar-profile asian-americans (high grades, similar extracuriculars) they hold them to a "higher standard" than similarly-achieving non-asians. This is justified in the name of diversity.
  - doctorpangloss 14y ago
    Are Ivy League universities the only ones a student can apply to for a specific program? Do Ivy League universities have to admit anyone if they don't want to? Do students even have only one choice of public discounted universities? The experience seems pretty distinct.
    - mike_esspe 14y ago
      In USSR jews could go to other universities too (though they were low profile and i think had quotas too, just higher). I don't understand how it justifies the discrimination.
    - praxulus 14y ago
      While it's not as extreme as the the situation described in the article, it's still racism. A restaurant isn't allowed to discriminate based on race, why is a university?
    - jychang 14y ago

tlogan 14y ago

As far as know from my Russian friends raise of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union started in late 1970s / early 1980s. Is that correct? Does anybody know why? Was it because of renewal of Russian nationalism?

zalew 14y ago
It started way before WW2 with Stalin's propaganda against Trocki. It rose once again after WW2 on political grounds when Stalin saw the birth of Israel as a threat that the vast jew population now having its own nation (and collaborating with the US) will undermine the integrity of the country. Contrary to Hitler's vision, Stalin's xenophobia wasn't based directly on ethnic grounds per se, it were delusions of a tyrant who slaughters its own people wherever and whenever he sees any political threat. The more modern antisemitic propaganda supposedly appeared under Putin's conflict with Jelcyn's oligarchs. It won't make you feel better, but although anti-semitism is the most 'mainstream' discrimination, Russia is an enormous country full of various ethnic minorities under threat. Take note although I've read a few about Russia, I'm far from an expert on it and it's a really complicated place for me, so you should investigate the issues I mentioned further to get a better view.
- akiselev 14y ago
  You are correct about the discrimination against many minorities. When it comes to foreign policy, Russia will go to hell and back to protect its people (i.e., South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and the Georgian invasion) but when it comes to internal matters, there is a growing nationalism among the populism. Navalny, for example, is a known supporter of nationalists despite being "Putin's number one enemy" and the most visible opposer to his regime. Furthermore, you'd have to try not to find videos of Russian nationalists murdering minorities on Google and Youtube. Many people who immigrate from the -stan countries are the equivalent of Mexicans in the United States, having faced constant discrimination for taking Russians' jobs (in construction for instance).
  - zalew 14y ago
    -stans imigrants obviously, but I had also in mind the various native tribes of Syberia.

sologoub 14y ago

Interesting read and I've heard similar stories, as well as know one person who got in, but still talks about how terrible it was even after admission... this is of course terrible and blatantly stupid of any nation to discriminate of bright minds on questions of faith or origin... but what does it have to do with Hacker News?

tzs 14y ago
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" This was interesting, as you noted.

yen223 14y ago

This, right here, is an excellent example of why institutionalized racism is a terrible thing. In any other situation, universities would be clamoring to have a student of such calibre study at their institution. But because this man was, heaven forbid, a Jew, they simply couldn't take him in. This comment is mostly pointed at my home country of Malaysia, where "special rights" of members of a certain racial group is enshrined in our freakin constitution![0] [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Malaysia#Article_153_-_Special_Position_of_Bumiputras_and_Legitimate_Interests_of_Other_Communities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Malaysia#Articl...

edanm 14y ago
I think there's a good case to be made that the problem with institutionalized racism is terrible not just because society loses out on a great mathematician, but rather, because it hurts individuals by discriminating against them. Just because he turned out to be a great mathematician doesn't make his story any more painful or wrong.
- yen223 14y ago
  You are absolutely correct. People absolutely do get hurt when they are discriminated against. As a second-class citizen in my country, I truly understand this. The point I was trying to make was that the people doing the discriminating also get hurt in the process, thanks to lost opportunities such as the loss of this mathematician. There's really no benefit whatsoever to promoting irrational discrimination such as racism.

doctorpangloss 14y ago

My mom and dad faced identical problems in the late 70s. I would urge no simple comparisons between elite private U.S. university admissions in 2012 and public Soviet Union university admissions throughout the century. The experience of Jews in the Soviet Union is substantially distinct from the experience of nonwhites in the contemporary United States. Remember: If Harvard wants to, it doesn't have to admit anyone at all. There are lots of universities in America, in fact lots of best ones. There was only one MGU.

barry-cotter 14y ago
There's only one Harvard. It's the most prestigious undergraduate university on Earth.
- gadders 14y ago
  Apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
  - barry-cotter 14y ago
    Hey, I'd prefer to live, study at, or work at Oxford too, or Cambridge, but there is actually only one Harvard. The first sentence of my post is true and was responding to its parent post saying there's only one MSU. Harvard is definitely the most prestigious university in the US, just as Oxford is definitely the most prestigious university in the UK. Please noye I said nothing anout quality of education.
    - gadders 14y ago
      Yeah, I didn't mean one was better than the other, just that any of them on your CV would look equally good. There are probably European and Asian equivalents, (Sorbonne?) but I have no idea what they would be.
      - barry-cotter 14y ago

siculars 14y ago

My mothers father had to bribe the admissions board of Moscow U. to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars to let her in. This was in the late 60's/early 70's. Anti-Semitism, but of course. They left as soon as possible for Israel and then America. Honestly, I often think that if Germany and the Soviets had not hated Jews so much the world would be a very different place.

huhtenberg 14y ago
Which department? Just curious.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
Where did he get tens of thousands of dollars (even if in the Rouble equivalent)? Just curious. Seems to be a sum out of reach of any citizen who is not a miner, a polar worker or engineer-in-chief.
- rada 14y ago
  I had an almost exact same "forget-it-not-gonna-happen" conversation with an admissions officer at MSU around 1984 (I think). It was suggested to my parents that a substantial bribe would reverse my fortunes. We chose not to apply - I went to my local U instead - but they could have definitely afforded it: they were both high-earners (my dad headed a science lab and my mom was a professor) plus they both made the so-called northern coefficient (basically, 2.5x regular salary for living in Bumf--k Siberia).
- siculars 14y ago
  Let's just say he was... creative.

lini 14y ago

About a year ago I read a paper that listed a number of those "Jewish Problems" (ambiguous or hard problems given at entrance exams). For those interested - http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

praptak 14y ago
They were more than just hard. They were specifically picked for being solvable using relatively easy tools (so as not to give basis for appeal) with solutions being extremely hard to figure out.

mukaiji 14y ago

thank you for your remarkable courage and determination.

kombine 14y ago

> The problem looked innocent enough at first glance: given a circle and two points on the plane outside the circle, construct another circle passing trough those two points and touching the first circle at one point.But the solution is in fact quite complicated. Few of my future colleagues at Harvard and Berkeley would have been able to solve it right away. One must use “inversion,” a concept that was not studied in high school and hence could not possibly be allowed in this exam. I became quite curious about solving this problem, I tried to look up what he means by "inversion" but could not find it. Anyone knows what it could be? Update: Wikipedia suggests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_in_a_point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_in_a_point but obviously this is covered by high school program and is not very complicated.

dch 14y ago
The concept he's talking about is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_inversion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_inversion; http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Inversion.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Inversion.html has a bit more detail.
- kombine 14y ago
  Thanks, and the problem in question is actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_Apollonius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_Apollonius

PRJIUS 14y ago

As a preamble there most definitely existed anti-semitism in Soviet Union. I am a Russian living in the US with Jewish family in Russia. This is a throw away account. With that said, stories of anti-semitism told by Russian Jews in US should not be taken at face value. These folks are subject to a very strong selection bias. Most of them came to the US as refugees who were recognized by the US State Department as being discriminated against for being Jewish in USSR/Russia. Secondly they have interest in maintaining the story anti-seminitism because it validates their narrative and could potentially help their relatives immigrate to the US. Additionally many stories of anti-semitism that I heard were something a non-jew would experience as well but attributed to anti-semitism. As a personal example, I was at first denied admission to a specialized school in very late Soviet period. They eventually let me in because my mother found out that I had the highest score on the entrance exam of any one. Their excuse was that they had to let the kids who were in the paid summer program at the school first and now the class was full. A Jewish kid's parents would have been told they already have too many Jews in the advanced program. Both cases are just the admissions persons asking for a bribe.

JabavuAdams 14y ago

I'm often amazed by the stupidity of our species, but not usually infuriated. Well, I guess that whole global race for talent didn't work out so well for the USSR.

tokenadult 14y ago

I see questions here in the thread about how university selection currently works in the United States. There is quite an exhaustive thread on that subject, "'Race' in College Admission FAQ & Discussion," on the College Confidential discussion site, http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1366406-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-10-a.html http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/13664... and the first few FAQ posts in that thread link out to much official information about current United States policies on the subject, current college practice, and the controlling Supreme Court cases. There is, of course, a case currently before the Supreme Court that may result in a change in the controlling law, and commentary about the pending case is also linked to from that thread. The issue of admission of Jews to United States universities is also discussed there.

rehack 14y ago

wow! what a great read. This article confirms the anti-semitism in USSR, which has been described by several others. I am surprised there is no mention of Grigory Perelman[1] in the discussion here on HN. The genius mathematician who proved PoinCare Conjecture, a problem standing for 100 years. And then later on refused the million dollar prize which was to be awarded for the proof[2]. The reason, this article reminds of Perelman is that he also faced similar kind of discrimination, in the USSR. But it was more subtle in Perelman's case. And he was able to get what he wanted from the USSR system, in terms of going to the university he wanted. Masha Gessen has written a biography on Perelman in her book 'Perfect Rigor'. The book also serves as a commentary on the Russian Math culture (which is very very impressive by the way) and their education system. Now reading this article, I want to read Edward Frenkel's book as well. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman [2] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/24/grigori-perelman-reclusiv_n_511938.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/24/grigori-perelman-re... Edit: typo

ucee054 14y ago

From article: "People of other nationalities, like Tatars and Armenians, against whom there were prejudices and persecution—though not nearly on the same scale as against the Jews" The Soviet Union killed Ukrainians by the millions.