Nobel Prize controversies been favored to receive the Prize, but a committee member was later quoted as saying that they would have been "too predictable, too popular." The 1974 prize was denied to Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow in favor of a joint award for Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson—both Nobel judges and unknown outside their home country. Bellow won in 1976; neither Greene nor Nabokov took home the prize. The 1970 prize was awarded to Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who did not attend the ceremony in Stockholm for fear that the Soviet Union would prevent his return. His
State Prize of the Russian Federation State Prize of the Russian Federation The State Prize of the Russian Federation, officially translated in Russia as Russian Federation National Award, is a state honorary prize established in 1992 as the successor for the USSR State Prize following the breakup of the Soviet Union. In 2004 the rules for selection of laureates and the status of the award were significantly changed making them closer to such awards as the Nobel Prize or the Soviet Lenin Prize. Every year seven prizes are awarded: Only three prizes for humanitarian work have been awarded so far: to Patriarch Alexius II, Primate of