There’s only one real connection between the topic of the letter copied below and the theme of this newsletter: the criminal war against Ukraine has left me unable to concentrate on the book review I had intended to write this week. I had planned to devote my free time to tying up loose ends in a review of Stuart Russell’s “Human Compatible” that was scheduled to appear on March 9, but that will have to wait.
There is another tenuous connection, in that the International Mathematical Union’s bowing to the inevitable, by cancelling the in-person International Congress of Mathematicians planned for St. Petersburg and entirely dissociating the virtual ICM that will replace it from the Russian government, provides a vivid and extremely unwelcome demonstration of what my News Flash on the AMR called “the futility of attempting to isolate mathematical research from … ‘educational, social, and political’ factors.” The vain promise to do just that was one of the AMR’s main claims to originality. The IMU, the highest organized expression of international mathematics, aspires to be even more politically neutral, by failing to mention politics at all in its statutes, as illustrated in the main text below.
This tragedy has made it clear that the format of the ICM necessarily makes it a political event. It also inevitably brings the world of mathematics into close, if transitory, relations with actual politicians, although, as I learned while writing the main text, the nature and intensity of these relations has varied considerably from one ICM to the next. As Ilya Kapovich pointed out in a letter to the AMS Notices, the “level of involvement by prominent government figures” in the planning of the St. Petersburg ICM “is unprecedented in the ICM history.”
I had a bad feeling about this involvement as soon as St. Petersburg was chosen in 2018 for this year’s ICM. In the spring of 2020 I expressed my misgivings indirectly, in the Mathematics without Apologies blog, although I didn’t yet realize just how unsavory were some of the politicians involved. But at the time I was swayed by the organizers’ claim that it was important to bring an event as prestigious as the ICM to revive interest in mathematics on the part of young Russians, the implication being that agreeing to work within the Russian power structure was an acceptable sacrifice in pursuit of this goal.
And I didn’t have a ready answer to some of my more cynical colleagues, who pointed out, correctly, that very few countries that could afford to host an ICM had clean hands. In retrospect the answer should have been obvious: there’s something seriously wrong with the ICM model if it leads inevitably to such cynicism.
What follows is most of a letter that I sent to several officers of the IMU in early 2021 in order to argue that close association with politicians has unhealthy consequences for the mathematical community. My letter received a thoughtful and candid answer but since it was sent to me privately I will not reproduce it here. The immediate focus was the St. Petersburg ICM; however, the argument looked to the future as well as the past for examples. The two sentences quoted at the beginning are taken from a letter the IMU Executive Committee addressed to President Daya Reddy of the International Science Council (ISC). This letter was written in connection with an effort by certain mathematicians to convince the IMU to take an official stand on some of the concerns that had been raised in regard to holding the ICM in Russia. The IMU’s letter referred to the attempts of “some activists” to use these concerns at the time to motivate a boycott of the ICM, but that was not relevant to the effort to which the letter was a response.
…I note with particular interest the conjunction of the sentence
"The IMU rejects all boycotts of scientific events (as does the ISC) and all attempts to link scientific activities to political and societal issues.”
with the sentence
"The IMU endorses the International Science Council’s (ISC) Principle of Freedom, Responsibility and Universality of Science."
The rejection of any attempt to link mathematical activities to political and societal issues is thoroughly consistent with the objectives of the IMU, as formulated at the very beginning of the 2018 version of the IMU Statutes:
The objectives of the International Mathematical Union, hereinafter designated as the Union, are:
(a) To promote international cooperation in mathematics;
(b) To support and assist the International Congress of Mathematicians and other international scientific meetings or conferences;
(c) To encourage and support other international mathematical activities
considered likely to contribute to the development of mathematical science in any of its aspects, pure, applied, or educational.
It is hardly possible to imagine a more politically and societally neutral formulation of the IMU's objectives. I fully understand the reasons for such an expression of neutrality in a world that remains deeply divided by geopolitical conflict. It appears to me, however, that endorsement of the ISC's Principle of Freedom, Responsibility and Universality of Science makes this neutrality untenable. Specifically, the ISCU Statute 5 asserts that
the free and responsible practice of science … requires freedom of movement, association, expression and communication for scientists, as well as equitable access to data, information, and other resources for research.
In 2022 the IMU General Assembly may be called upon to decide whether or not to hold the 2026 ICM in the United States. Free entry into the United States by citizens of a number of countries was prohibited for several years by the Trump administration's travel ban. Although this restriction has been lifted by the new administration, the General Assembly will have no way of knowing whether the President elected in 2024 will choose to reinstate the travel ban. It would be hard to dismiss a call to boycott the ICM as unreasonable if the citizens of several IMU member states are unable to attend.
Of more immediate concern, the issue was raised in 2018 whether Russia's so-called "gay propaganda" law placed potential participants in the St. Petersburg ICM at risk, especially since the former governor of St. Petersburg, who was co-chair of the Executive Organizing Committee at the time, was one of the authors of the law in question. Some of us were told, in response to these concerns, that no foreign visitors to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi were arrested under this law. Some LGBT colleagues with whom we have spoken find this response only moderately reassuring; they are unlikely to be active in organizing a boycott, but they are also unlikely to attend.
Be that as it may, the IMU's stated political neutrality is contradicted by the practice of inviting high government officials to preside over the ICM opening ceremony.1 This practice seems to have become a recurrent feature of the Congress only with the presence of Chinese President Jiang Zemin at the Beijing Congress in 2002. Presumably some members of the IMU were of the opinion that participation by the highest political representatives of the host country would heighten the gravity and solemnity of the event. The committee that chose Madrid as the venue in 2006 could not have known that the photographs of the Spanish King Juan Carlos making his welcoming speech and presenting the Fields Medals to the laureates, far from lending the dignity of the host country to the published Congress Proceedings, would serve as an indelible reminder of the King's humiliating self-exile and loss of his pension as a result of his implication in several political scandals. The committee that chose Seoul as the venue in 2014 could likewise not have known that the photographs of former Korean President Park Geun-Hye in that year's published Proceedings would forever be linked to her sentence to a 25-year prison term for corruption.
By now, however, the IMU should have understood that its stated policy of political neutrality should at least serve the mathematical community as a shield from further embarrassment in the form of association with political operatives whose probity cannot be taken for granted. Future ICM participants will find the message posted by the (former) EOC Co-chair with regard to public health considerations for the St. Petersburg Congress less than reassuring when they realize that its author, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, has for some time been the object of corruption allegations. Just a few months before that message, at the beginning of the COVID crisis, she was called "the principal gravedigger of Russian medicine":
Ведь это та самая Татьяна Алексеевна Голикова, известная также как «мадам Арбидол» и «главная гробовщица российской медицины», которая за 6 лет работы министром здравоохранения проделала грандиозный труд по масштабнейшему развалу отечественного здравоохранения.
Tatiana Golikova's place as Co-chair of the EOC has since been taken by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry N. Chernyshenko, who is perhaps best known outside his home country for his removal by the International Olympic Committee from the Coordination Commission Beijing 2022 for his role in the Russian doping scandal. But her letter is still visible on the July 2020 ICM Newsletter, as is the letter from the current Governor of St. Petersburg and EOC committee member Alexander D. Beglov, whose "very curious worldview" was noted over two years ago in the newspaper Novye Isvestia. Although he emphasizes his eagerness to welcome visitors in the ICM Newsletter, a presentation to the students of the Polytechnical University two years earlier compared his compatriots to "the 300 Spartans," whose families are subject to "powerful psychological influence" and therefore need to defend the "younger generation from mind control from the outside":
защита населения, в том числе, и подрастающего поколения от управления их сознанием извне. Каждому из нас брошен этот вызов. Здесь работают очень тонкие технологии управления сознанием.
It's popular in some quarters to make disparaging remarks about Russia and its politicians, and the IMU should certainly be sensitive to the national feelings of all the mathematicians whose interests it represents. The point of these quotations, however, is not to show that Russian leaders are uniquely corrupt or express particularly disturbing ideas, much less that they are the only ones to be depicted in an unflattering way by their national journalists.
The examples already cited from Madrid in 2006 and Seoul in 2014 (and apparently a near-miss at Rio de Janeiro in 2018) show that association with politicians can leave a permanent stain on the ICM. And yet in spite of the IMU's rejection of linkage of scientific activities with politics, politicians are ubiquitous in planning of the next ICM, as they have been in IMU activities for some time now.
I was told in the summer of 2018 that Putin himself had promised to make time for the opening ceremony in St. Petersburg, and that this was a contributing factor in the choice of venue. Undoubtedly Putin has many admirers around the world, and he has repeatedly been elected President by margins that would be the envy of candidates anywhere (though his score hasn't quite matched Lukashenko's in Belarus — which is scheduled to host one of next summer's satellite conferences). Still, Putin is better known, and therefore more controversial, than most heads of state, and as Russia enters what appears to be another long season of national protest, it's not at all clear that the benefits of his presence at the opening ceremony — if that is really the plan — will outweigh possible long-term ramifications.
I can well understand that it may be too late to change plans for the organization of next year's ICM. But I urge the IMU to take steps to limit the presence and influence of politicians in the organization of future international meetings. Delinking the IMU's scientific activities from the influence of politics would only be consistent with the IMU's stated policy, and it will help the mathematical community avoid awkward decisions or uncomfortable scenes in the future.
While I was writing this it was announced that German authorities have seized Alisher Usmanov’s yacht, one of the most spectacular consequences of the sanctions imposed on Russian oligarchs in Putin’s circle. The yacht was purchased for $600 million and was at one time the world’s largest. Readers, especially those most directly concerned, are encouraged to discover for themselves the relevance of this news item to mathematics.
Comments are welcome on the Mathematics without Apologies blog.
My characterization of the role of government officials here is inaccurate, as the response from the IMU pointed out:
The tradition of a member of government participating in the opening ceremony of the ICM goes back a very long way, including the ICMs in 1986, 1990, 1994 and 1998. It usually is a government minister or another representative of the government, that reads a message from the head of state, but they have never presided over the ceremony.
I intended the word “preside” to be understood in a metaphoric sense to which it is unsuited.