These problems were designed to prevent Jewish people and other undesirables from getting a passing grade. Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find. Using problems with a simple solution protected the administration from extra complaints and appeals.The problems were called "coffins" for what I think are obvious reasons. (I'll leave the solution for that, if in doubt, as an exercise by the reader.) Khovanova goes the extra step of including 21 of the solvable problems in her paper and also includes hints and solutions. They look easy; they're damn hard. Damn hard, that is, unless you guess on some easy short cut (often a substitution or drawing trick).
A number of others have written about the discrimination at Moscow State University in the math department, and in Russia and the Soviet Union generally. Edward Frenkel, now a mathematician, describes the discrimination he faced in an article in October in The New Criterion. Shen described the same discrimination in great detail in a 1994 article in The Mathematical Intelligencer. There's a similar article here, and a good article by Mark Saul in the Notices of the American Mathematical society here. Discrimination against Jews in the Soviet university system -- and the apparent murder of Bella Abramovna Subbotovskaya by the KGB to protect the system -- is discussed in a really interesting article here.
Shen's also provided some of the problems with his article -- a mostly different set than Knovanova -- and Ilan Vardi now of the Ecole Polytechnique wrote them up with solutions, here via Khovanova as a pdf. So, you should click on the problems and start trying to solve them. Really, they look easy.
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