would be no cakewalk. But, he said, “if your son is as bright as you say he is, he will be admitted. There is no discrimination against Jews at the entrance exams here.” “I have to warn you, though,” he said at the end of the conversation, “Our postgraduate studies are handled by different people, and I think your son probably won’t be accepted to the grad school.” But that was something to worry about in five years, too far ahead. My father went to a couple of other schools in Moscow with applied math programs, but there was nothing like the attitude he found at the Institute of Oil and Gas. So when he came back home that evening and told me and my mom the news, we decided right away that I would apply to the Institute of Oil and Gas, to their applied mathematics program. The Institute was one of a dozen schools in Moscow preparing technicians for various industries, such as the Institute of Metallurgy and the Institute of Railway Engineers (in the Soviet Union, many colleges were called “institutes”). From the late 1960s, antiSemitism at MGU “created a market for placements in mathematics for Jewish students,” writes Mark Saul in his article.1 The Institute of Oil and Gas “began to cater to these markets, benefiting from the anti-Semitic policies of other universities to get highly qualified students.” Mark Saul explains: Its nickname, Kerosinka, reflected [their] pride and cynicism. A kerosinka is a kerosene-burning space heater, a low-tech but effective response to adversity. The students and graduates of the institute quickly became known as “kerosineshchiks,” and the school became a haven for Jewish students with a passion for mathematics. How did fate choose Kerosinka as the repository of so much talent? This question is not easy to answer. We know that there were other institutions that benefited from the exclusion of Jews from MGU. We also know that the establishment of this exclusionary policy was a conscious act, which probably met with some resistance at first. It may have been easier for some institutions to continue accepting Jewish students than for them to institute a new policy. But once the phenomenon grew and there was a cadre of Jewish students at Kerosinka, why was it tolerated? There are dark whispers of a plot by the secret police (KGB) to keep the Jewish students under surveillance in one or two places. But some of the motivation may have been more positive: the administration of the institute may have seen a good department developing and done what it could to preserve the phenomenon.
I believe the last sentence is more accurate. The President (or Rector, as he was called) of the Institute of Oil and Gas, Vladimir Nikolaevich Vinogradov, was a clever administrator known for recruiting professors who were engaged in innovative teaching and research and for using new technologies in the classrooms. He instituted the policy that all exams (including the entrance exams) were given in writing. Of course, there might still be some opportunity for abuse even with written tests (as was the case with my written exam at MGU), but the policy would prevent the kind of debacle that happened at my oral examination at MGU. I would not be surprised if it was Vinogradov’s personal decision not to discriminate against Jewish applicants, and if so, it must have required some good will, and perhaps even some courage, on his part. As predicted, there seemed to be no discrimination at the entrance exams. I was accepted after the first exam (written math), on which I got a 5, that is, an A (gold medalists were accepted outright if they got an A at the first exam). In a bizarre twist, this 5 did not come easy to me because apparently some of my solutions were entered