On Wednesday, it was announced that American Roger D. Kornberg won this year's Nobel Chemistry Prize for describing how information in the genes is copied and transferred to cells that produce proteins. Two other Americans, John C. Mather and George F. Smoot, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work that shed further light on the beginning of the universe. Two more Americans, Andrew Z. Fire of the MIT and Craig C. Mello, took the Nobel Prize for Medicine, for their discovery of ‘RNA interference’, a catalytic process proposed to occur in plants, animals and humans.

So much for the idea that Russians are better than Americans in math and science. But maybe you think this is just an aberration? Far from it. Russia (including the USSR) has only won 21 Nobel Prizes in its whole history, while the U.S. has 175 (not counting the most recent awards), eight times more than Russia.

Russians can go on believing the absurdly ignorant, xenophobic propaganda spewed out by their government, which tells them they are cleverer than the whole wide world and that American success is only due to luck, but the day of reckoning for Russians is fast approaching. They can go on trying to convince themselves that Sweden is full of "russophobes" or that America bribed its judges right up until the time that the very last Russian on the face of the earth breathes his last. Or they can wake up and smell the reality.

RUSSIA/USSR NOBEL LAUREATES (21)

• Alexei A. Abrikosov, Physics, 2003
• Zhores I. Alferov, Physics, 2000
• Nicolay G. Basov, Physics, 1964
• Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky*, Literature, 1987
• Ivan Bunin*, Literature, 1933
• Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, Physics, 1958
• Il´ja Mikhailovich Frank, Physics, 1958
• Vitaly Ginzburg, Physics, 2003
• Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace, 1990
• Leonid Kantorovich, Economics, 1975
• Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, Physics, 1978
• Lev Davidovich Landau, Physics, 1962
• Ilya Mechnikov, Physiology or Medicine, 1908
• Boris Pasternak, Literature, 1958 (forced to decline)
• Ivan Pavlov, Physiology or Medicine, 1904
• Aleksandr M. Prokhorov, Physics, 1964
• Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, Peace, 1975
• Nikolay Semenov, Chemistry, 1956
• Michail Sholokhov, Literature, 1965
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Literature, 1970
• Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm, Physics, 1958

Note that Russia has won five Nobel prizes for literature and three of the five (Bunin, Brodsky and Solzhenitsin) either spurned Russia or were exiled. The U.S. has won twelve Nobels in literature, more than twice as many as Russia and second only to France in the world, including the novelists Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner. Yet, Russians haughtily belittle America's literary tradition. America also has two female novelists (Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison) who won a Nobel, while Russia has none.