Valery Senderov

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Valery Senderov (Valeriy Senderov) was a Soviet mathematician, teacher, and human-rights activist who fought against state-sponsored antisemitism. He was born on March 17, 1945, in Moscow and studied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 1968, just before finishing his doctoral work, he was expelled for “philosophical literature,” a phrase used by censors for anti-Soviet writings. He completed his degree in 1970.

In the 1970s, Senderov taught mathematics at the Second Mathematical School in Moscow. He joined the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (an anticommunist group) and the International Society for Human Rights. In the 1980s he helped lead the International Society for Human Rights and helped found the Free Interprofessional Association of Workers, the first Soviet labor union aimed at being independent of the government.

In 1982, the KGB arrested Senderov for publishing anti-communist material abroad, including in the magazines Posev and Russkaya Mysl. He admitted he was a member of NASR. He was sentenced to seven years of hard labor plus five years of exile. He spent much of his time in a harsh prison near Perm, often in solitary confinement, protesting the confiscation of his Bible and the ban on studying mathematics.

Senderov was released in 1987. In 1988 he became the leader of NASR in the Soviet Union and held the first official press conference in that role. During perestroika, NASR supported opposition parties. He wrote many political articles, some mathematical works, and three books. He died on November 12, 2014, in Moscow at the age of 69.

In 1980 he co-published Intellectual Genocide with Boris Kanevsky, describing how Jewish applicants were treated unfairly at Soviet universities, especially Moscow State University. He explained methods used to keep Jews out of math and science, such as giving them extremely hard problems or questions outside the standard curriculum, and he offered advice on how to prepare and how to appeal unfair decisions. He also helped create informal “Jewish National University” courses where famous mathematicians gave lectures to applicants denied admission for being Jewish.