I understand your point about honesty being preferable if you're going to discriminate - although I'm not sure if I agree - but why do you think that what Soviet universities did was in any way honest or open?
Soviet laws did not allow any discrimination based on origin - there was no dispute about that. (Strangely enough, there is a dispute about whether the US law allows it). So a group of people to carry out the dirty work needed to be selected, and secret directives needed to be given to many others. A variety of subterfuges had to be used - first, to break the blinding on the written exams (typically, they would assign specific seats to Jewish students as they came into the auditorium and gave their names; the exam papers would then be marked in some way when they handed them in; but there were many other stratagems). Then, they'd send grown men to intimidate, bully, and humiliate school students during the oral exam, to try to "bury" them with questions that they couldn't possibly answer, and finally, if they got some uppity gold medalist from the Math Olympiad who would answer them, or someone as strong as Frenkel (who went on to teach at Harvard at age 21), just start lying to their faces.
The atmosphere that all this created at MSU and several other institutions was absolutely poisonous. Just the fact of having people in charge who would do all this was demoralizing to the faculty; it was also demoralizing to the students, who could plainly see what was done to their Jewish classmates in the application process, and to all the regular examiners. The application process - which was supposed to be objective in the first place, and not "holistic" - was defiled. The greatest irony of the situation is that the mathematics department of the MGU, whose status was mythological, and which these students believed was so indispensable to them, was not even very good during this period. The curriculum had stagnated since the 1950s, and the research was much weaker than it used to be.
Incidentally, the lying goes on to the present day - the MSU has never admitted to anything, let alone apologized. Some words were apparently said to Frenkel and some others in private, but for the most part, everyone involved just plays dumb.
Soviet laws did not allow any discrimination based on origin - there was no dispute about that. (Strangely enough, there is a dispute about whether the US law allows it). So a group of people to carry out the dirty work needed to be selected, and secret directives needed to be given to many others. A variety of subterfuges had to be used - first, to break the blinding on the written exams (typically, they would assign specific seats to Jewish students as they came into the auditorium and gave their names; the exam papers would then be marked in some way when they handed them in; but there were many other stratagems). Then, they'd send grown men to intimidate, bully, and humiliate school students during the oral exam, to try to "bury" them with questions that they couldn't possibly answer, and finally, if they got some uppity gold medalist from the Math Olympiad who would answer them, or someone as strong as Frenkel (who went on to teach at Harvard at age 21), just start lying to their faces.
The atmosphere that all this created at MSU and several other institutions was absolutely poisonous. Just the fact of having people in charge who would do all this was demoralizing to the faculty; it was also demoralizing to the students, who could plainly see what was done to their Jewish classmates in the application process, and to all the regular examiners. The application process - which was supposed to be objective in the first place, and not "holistic" - was defiled. The greatest irony of the situation is that the mathematics department of the MGU, whose status was mythological, and which these students believed was so indispensable to them, was not even very good during this period. The curriculum had stagnated since the 1950s, and the research was much weaker than it used to be.
Incidentally, the lying goes on to the present day - the MSU has never admitted to anything, let alone apologized. Some words were apparently said to Frenkel and some others in private, but for the most part, everyone involved just plays dumb.