and incorporated the neo-Platonic views of Eastern Orthodoxy into his understanding of the relation of mathematics and religion. In his talk to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences upon receiving a prize, Shafarevich presented his view of the relationship between mathematics and religion. He noted the multiple discoveries in mathematics, such as that of non-Euclidean geometry, to suggest that pure mathematics reflects an objective reality, not a set of conventional definitions or a formalism. He claimed that the growth of mathematics itself is not directed or organic. To have a unity and direction, mathematics needs a goal. It can be practical applications or God as the source for the direction of development. Shafarevich opted for the latter, as pure mathematics is not in itself driven by practical applications. Russian politics On 21 December 1991 he took part in the first congress of the Russian All-People's Union, headed by Sergei Baburin. In October 1992, he became a member of the founding committee of the National Salvation Front. In 1993, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the State Duma with Mikhail Astafyev's Constitutional Democratic Party - Party of Popular Freedom. Shafarevich was a member of the editorial board of the magazine Nash Sovremennik and in 1991–1992 of the editorial board of Den of Alexander Prokhanov, which ceased publication in October 1993 and later reopened under the title Zavtra. In 1994, he joined the "All-Russian National Right Wing Centre", led by Mikhail Astafyev. Accusations of antisemitism Shafarevich's essay Russophobia was expanded into his book Three Thousand-Year-Old Mystery (Трехтысячелетняя загадка) and resulted in accusations of antisemitism. He completed the Russophobia essay in 1982 and it was initially circulated as samizdat. In the Soviet Union, it was first officially published in 1989. At the same time, Shafarevich condemned the methods that were used to screen out applicants of Jewish origin when entering prestigious Moscow universities in the 1970s and early 1980s. In Russophobia, he argued in the essay that great nations experience periods in their history of reformist elitist groups ('small nations') having values that differ fundamentally from the values of the majority of the people but gaining the upper hand in the society. In Shafarevich's opinion, the role of such a 'small nation' in Russia was played by a small group of intelligentsiya, dominated by Jews, who were full of hatred against traditional Russian way of life and played an active role in the terrorist