* Astronomy

Exactly 25 years ago, on September 23, 1982, at about 11 oclock at night, an accident occurred in a dark street in Moscow. A woman walked along the sidewalk. She had just visited her mother and was on her way home. It was a quiet street, hardly a vehicle passed by at this hour. Suddenly a truck appeared at high speed, hit the woman, and drove off. Moments later another car drove up, stopped for a moment next to the victim, and also drove off. An ambulance camewho had called it?and took the victim straight to the morgue. The funeral took place the next day. It was a very low key affair, nobody talked, no eulogy was held. Mourners only whispered among themselves, all the while observed by a few official-looking men. Eventually everybody quietly dispersed. The hit-and-run driver was never found, and the case was closed. The accident had all the trappings of a KGB hit. The victim was the 44-year old mathematician Bella Abramovna Subbotovskaya. In the days preceding her death she had been summoned several times for interrogations to KGB offices. The crime about which she was questioned was the organization of a Jewish Peoples University.
It is almost forgotten today, but not so long ago Jews were routinely denied entry to reputable institutes of higher education in the Soviet Union. Although the discriminatory practice was not limited to mathematics, it was especially glaring in this field to which Jews had been traditionally drawn. Twenty-five to thirty percent of the graduates of the high schools that were geared towards physics and mathematics were Jewish; only a handful were admitted to the top institutes. The most prestigious among them was MekhMat, the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University. The driving forces behind MekhMats adherence to the anti-Semitic admissions policy decreed from above were V. A. Sadovnichii, currently rector of Moscow University; O. B. Lupanov, MekhMats dean from 1980 until his death in 2006; and A. S. Mishchenko, professor and senior examiner at MekhMat. But anti-Semitism in Soviet mathematics was not restricted to insignificant, small-minded people. Distinguished Soviet mathematicians were known to be pathological anti-Semites, for example L. S. Pontryagin and I. M. Vinogradov, who wielded enormous power over the lives and careers of Soviet mathematicians, but also, surprisingly, the human rights activist I. R. Shafarevich. The absurd justifications some of them gave for their virulent feelings against Jewswhich were buttressed by the administrative authority some of them heldwas that Jews are genetically programmed to develop mathematical abilities at an early age. By the time ethnic Russians fully develop their mathematical powers, so the reasoning went, all opportunities to study and all faculty positions are already taken by Jews. Such a situation was to be prevented by barring the latter from access to higher mathematics education right after high school. A more prosaic reason for the rabid anti-Semitism exhibited by the Soviet authorities was their cowardly desire to blame others for their economic and other failures.

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