People often think of antisemitism in the Soviet Union as a uniquely Stalin-era phenomenon, marked by events like the Doctors’ Plot or the murder of Jewish cultural figures such as Solomon Mikhoels. It is indeed comforting to believe that the worst of it died with Stalin. However, reality reflected quite the contrary. Antisemitism evolved and became embedded in the very institutions that claimed to embody the socialist ideals of equality envisioned by their ideological founders. By the 1970s, it was quietly but systematically shutting Jewish students out of elite opportunities, especially in mathematics. The Soviet state preached equality, but for many Jewish students, the lived reality was one of rejection and obstruction. Still, a generation pressed on, fueled by a deep love of mathematics and a quiet resolve to pursue it in spite of the barriers. The stories of mathematicians Oleg Gleizer, Igor Pak, and Alexander Beilinson reveal not only the depth of exclusion but also the enduring intellectual passion and underground mentorship that helped sustain it.
The world of Soviet mathematics was not just a system of education, but rather a deeply intricate and ideologically embedded culture. It rested on three pillars: specialized math schools, fiercely competitive Olympiads, and a widespread network of informal math circles. Within this vibrant world, mathematics did not function as a typical profession; its role in Soviet society often differed from the norms of academic life elsewhere. As UCLA mathematics professor Igor Pak observed, “I think that outside of the Soviet Union, in normal society, mathematics is a profession. In the Soviet Union, this was different in the sense that many people did research as a hobby or as some kind of activity that would help them get a promotion, but didn’t even care if they worked at a university.” He added, “When you create an authoritarian regime that does not place value in research the way it is placed in the free world, your relationships between research and career trajectory disappear.”
Jewish students applying to elite mathematics departments, particularly at Moscow State University (MGU), in the 1970s and 1980s were acutely aware of the barriers before them. UCLA Professor Oleg Gleizer, a then straight-A student who had won mathematics, physics, and history competitions, as well as a youth boxing championship, recalled being told outright by his school’s Communist Party supervisor: “We all know you deserve a gold medal, but I was instructed by my supervisors that you are not going to get it because you are Jewish.” Without the gold medal, which guaranteed automatic university admission, he had to navigate an application system stacked against him. University of Chicago Professor Alexander Beilinson similarly observed that in 1973, “basically all people who had anything to do with Jews failed the entrance exam” to MGU [Moscow State University], unless they had went through the International Mathematical Olympiad.”
Beilinson himself failed the entrance exams to MGU despite his mathematical talent. Later, he reflected that the exams were “specially tailored” to make it “extremely difficult” for Jewish students to pass. As he put it, “The lords of the Moscow mathematical establishment kept it clean from anything Jewish.”
Discrimination was coded into institutional procedure: unofficial quotas capped Jewish admissions, and oral exams often included “killer problems,” questions with elegant but extremely obscure solutions, where one small misstep could be used to fail an otherwise qualified applicant. These problems were not part of the standard mathematics curriculum and were often selected specifically to trip up candidates. Meanwhile, officials like Viktor Sadovnichiy, who would later become rector of MGU (and hold the title to this day), played active roles in maintaining these barriers. The tactics weren’t written down, but everyone understood them.
Faced with exclusion from formal education, Jewish mathematicians and their allies formed a parallel structure. The Jewish People’s University (JPU), spearheaded by Bella Subbotovskaya, a mathematics professor who the KGB allegedly murdered, and later described by UC Davis Professor Dmitry Fuchs, was an underground institution for rejected students. It grew from Subbotovskaya’s apartment into a large network that offered rigorous courses based on the Mekh-Mat curriculum. Lectures were held in secret, notes were distributed via samizdat, and teachers included some of the country’s top mathematicians.
For Gleizer, who participated in similar informal networks, these support structures were vital. Years later, Gleizer would become the director of the Los Angeles Math Circle, a nod to the Soviet tradition of math circles: “I wanted to give back to the next generation the way my mentors gave to me,” he said.
Despite being shut out of Soviet academia, many Jewish mathematicians flourished after emigration. Gleizer, Beilinson, and Pak all later found success in the United States. Oleg Gleizer now teaches at UCLA and runs the Los Angeles Math Circle, passing on the kind of training that once had to be hidden underground. Alexander Beilinson became a professor at the University of Chicago, where his pioneering work in algebraic geometry earned him the 2017 Wolf Prize and transformed the field. Igor Pak, also a professor at UCLA, built a distinguished career in combinatorics and discrete mathematics. Each, in different ways, carried forward a mathematical tradition that had been shaped by exclusion and resilience.
Still, the memories they carry are not all the same. Gleizer and Pak recall the Soviet years with bitterness. As Gleizer put it, “Because, I mean, the things I went through as a Jewish kid, they made me tough, but they didn’t make me nicer, and were a huge waste of time. The reason I hate this even now is because they wasted five or six years of my life.” Beilinson’s recollection was different. In an email, he wrote that those years brought him “a feeling of wonder,” which he compared to the atmosphere of Norstein’s animated short Hedgehog in the Fog. The ten-minute film follows a small hedgehog as he journeys through a misty forest filled with strange sounds and shifting shapes. There is no clear danger and no villain, only curiosity, beauty, and quiet disorientation. Beilinson emphasized that the film was created “by a free person, truly free,” and that it reveals something essential about “what real things in life are.” Professor Beilison’s experience of the Soviet world, while marked by constraint, also contained moments of openness, introspection, and wonder.
That sense of wonder carried over into Beilinson’s unexpected path. Failing the MGU entrance exam, he entered the Moscow Pedagogical Institute instead, an experience he later called “a benison.” The lighter academic demands gave him the freedom to attend top-level university seminars in the evenings, roam the woods outside the city, and study mathematics on his own terms. In a society built on control and conformity, this accidental detour gave him something rare: time, intellectual freedom, and space for quiet discovery.
Like the hedgehog, Beilinson remembers navigating a world where paths disappeared without warning, where trust and curiosity were sometimes all you had. Life in the Soviet Union, he suggests, was a journey through uncertainty, illuminated now and then by moments of quiet, stubborn wonder.
