Secondly, if they are caught red-handed they are unnecessarily risking their life for a little information. Who wants to do that? They cannot read books of their own choice. For example, my books are banned. And the KGB has been against my sannyasins there, taking all their books, newspapers, photographs, and everything concerning me, and torturing and persecuting and interrogating them continuously to inform about other members, to inform who are the other people connected with this movement who have any other literature.

Now this kind of a society is inhuman. In Russia it is impossible even for Karl Marx to be born again, because he was a free thinker. England allowed him to publish his books against England, against capitalism. Russia would not allow him to publish a book against Russia and against communism. So in these sixty years Russia has not given any geniuses; and this is important to remember, because before the revolution Russia was one of the countries with the most potential for producing geniuses.

The best novelists were Russians. If you make a list of the ten greatest novelists in the whole history of the world, the first five have to be the Russian ones. There is no other way, because they produced the best novels, poetry, painting. All that creativity has been destroyed. In sixty years not a single Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. Not a single person comparable to these has been able to assert himself.

The only way for genius to move is towards science, and that too has to remain unknown to the whole world. Sakharov was not known before the Nobel prize was declared. Nobody knew that a man existed who had gone deeper into the physical world than Albert Einstein. Now this man belongs to the whole world. He is not a property of Russia. Genius cannot be a property of any nation, and a genius of such caliber is simply rotting in Siberia. And he is not alone there, there are three other Nobel prize winning scientists. Nobody had ever heard their names till they received the Nobel prize.

Russia does not want anybody outside to know who are the important people in the country, for fear that they may be contacted or bribed, and they think of the Nobel prize as a bribe. So the man becomes world famous, the man goes to Sweden to take the Nobel prize, comes in contact with world media, world scientists, comes to see the outside world and find out that Russia is thousands of years backwards. In Russia he was told that they are living the latest philosophy, communism, and outside they see what is happening, how people are free.

So they don’t want anybody to go out of Russia. This Nobel prize becomes an excuse for him to go out. They refuse, but their refusal makes the man famous around the world. And if he disobeys, he is thrown into jail, thrown into a mental hospital, thrown into Siberia, and then nobody hears anything about him. This is a criminal society.