More recently, a team of U.S. geophysicists also found they were not welcome in former Soviet territory. A few days after the geophysics group arrived at their seismic station in Kazakhstan, officials from the KGB and the immigration service accused them of not having the proper paperwork. The officials confiscated the Americans' visas and gave them 48 hours to leave the country. The U.S. team had set out an array of 480 seismic sensors, but they had to depart before they could record a single tremor. No one knows what went wrong in either case.
Speculation ranges from the practical to the paranoid.
D.C. Even rivalry between different scientific organizations within Russia may be at work, since hard currency is vital to Russian research now. The scientists' misadventures have received little press coverage, even in scientific journals. Nobody wants much fuss, and the scientists involved just want to see their projects running again.