Igor Panarin


Igor Nikolaevich Panarin is a Russian professor and political scientist. He is best known for predicting in 1998 that the United States would disintegrate within the next few years.
Igor Panarin has written 15 books and a number of articles on information warfare, psychology, and geopolitics. He is often interviewed by Russian and foreign media on issues of Russian policy, development of relationships with the U.S., etc. Panarin also has his own weekly radio programme.
He has led electoral campaigns in Russia and abroad, and his students have included parliamentary deputies, regional leaders, Kremlin officials, and Foreign Ministry spokespeople. His interests include history, philosophy, psychology, computer science, communication, election technology, conceptual problems of globalisation, and the theory and practice of information warfare.

Biography

Panarin graduated from the Higher Military Command School of Telecommunications of the KGB in Oryol and the Division of Psychology of the Lenin Military-Political Academy. In 1993 he defended his thesis for Candidate of Psychological Sciences, titled "Psychological Factors of the Officer's Activity in Conditions of Innovations". His Doctorate in Political Sciences was awarded by the Russian Academy of Public Administration in 1997 for a thesis titled "Informational-Psychological Support of the National Security of Russia".
Panarin began his career in the KGB of the Soviet Union in 1976. After 1991, he worked in the FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, reaching the Colonel rank. His field of activity was strategic analysis and integration of closed and open information streams, information stream management in crisis situations, and situation modelling of global processes. He did strategic forecasts for the then President Boris Yeltsin. From 1999 to 2003, he worked as the Head of the Analytical Division of the Central Election Commission of Russia. From 2006 to 2007, Panarin was the Press Secretary of the Russian Federal Space Agency, the Russian analogue of the U.S. NASA.
Prof. Panarin started his teaching career in 1989 and has taught in the Moscow State University, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the Russian Academy of Public Administration, and the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, where he has worked since 1999. He also carries out activities on his own. In 2004, he launched his official website. In April 2008, his first training seminar called "Information warfare – technologies for success" was held. It was targeted at top managers of state and business structures, press service managers of authorities and large corporations, anti-crisis management experts, and decision makers in time-deficit situations. On 20 May 2009, Panarin started World politics – his own weekly radio programme on the Voice of Russia radio.
Panarin is currently the dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and appears regularly on Russian television channels.

Views and ideas

Panarin says he is a supporter of Russia as a superstate but claims that Russia presently has no imperial ambitions. He also supports Pan-Eurasian nationalism of Nikolai Trubetzkoy. Panarin criticises Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky but recognizes Joseph Stalin for realizing a geopolitical project of his own – a synthesised historical Russian geopolitical idea of Joseph Volotsky, Philotheus, Nikolay Danilevsky and Konstantin Leontiev. In his view, after 1934 Stalin started a process of recreation of the Rus doctrine "Moscow – a Third Rome" in new historical conditions.
Panarin condemns the activity of the last General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – Mikhail Gorbachev. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the latter's rise to power, Panarin called him "the Antihero of Russia". On Panarin's initiative, an action called a Public Tribunal against Gorbachev for the downfall of the USSR and crimes against its peoples was carried out at the web portal KM.ru from 2 to 22 December 2005, resulting in 56,298 people condemning Gorbachev.
Panarin opposes the Houston programme of 1990 and criticises the Russian finance minister Alexey Kudrin for following it, saying the 2008 financial crisis in Russia is a part of it. He recommends selling oil and gas to Ukraine only for roubles and withdrawal of all Russian funds from the American "financial Titanic", buying gold and creating powerful Russian banks. He also recommends granting credits only in roubles.

New British Empire

In 2005, Panarin coined the term "New British Empire", which in his view started forming in 1945 and consists of 7 levels, with the following structure :
  1. American-British transnational capital: Control centres – London and New York, analytical centre – RAND Corporation.
  2. USA: Control centre – Washington DC, analytical centre – the State Department of the USA.
  3. British Commonwealth: Control centre – London, analytical centre – the BBC.
  4. Trojan horse states: Poland, Saudi Arabia
  5. Economically controlled states
  6. Politically controlled states
  7. Destabilisation states: Central Asian states, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Yugoslavia
Panarin has written that the September 11 attacks in 2001 may have been aimed at replacing levels 2 and 3 of the New British Empire with China and the Chinese Commonwealth, respectively, accelerating the U.S. collapse, or preventing it.

Prediction of the United States collapse in 2010

In the summer of 1998, based on classified data about the state of the U.S. economy and society supplied to him by fellow analysts at FAPSI, Panarin forecast the probable disintegration of the US into six parts in 2010, following a civil war triggered by mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation. He forecast financial and demographic changes provoking a political crisis in which wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government, effectively seceding from the Union, leading to social unrest, civil war, national division, and intervention of foreign powers. Panarin sees the task of the world elite as not letting the USA follow the Yugoslavian model of disintegration; it is desirable that it follows the Czechoslovakian model of disintegration so that everything goes calmly and peacefully.
Explaining his theory in an interview with Izvestia, Panarin stated that "The U.S. dollar isn't secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche; this is a pyramid, which has to collapse.... Dissatisfaction is growing, and it is only being held back at the moment by the elections, and the hope can work miracles. But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2008, Panarin said:
There's a 55–45% chance right now that disintegration will occur.... One could rejoice in that process... But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario – for Russia. Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

In March 2009, Panarin gave a speech at the Diplomatic Academy in which he stated that "There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010" and predicted that Russia and China, which will soon become economic superpowers, will need to collaborate to rebuild the world economy with a new currency once the United States cease to exist.
This hypothesis gained world attention a decade after its initial announcement due to the 2008 financial crisis and has been widely criticised since.
In October 2011, Panarin stated that Occupy Wall Street protests have "highlighted the ever-deepening split with America's ruling elite." He also cited several American professors and analysts who he claims support his view that the United States will soon collapse, including Gerald Celente, Stephen F. Cohen, and Thomas W. Chittum.

Other ideas

Panarin conceived a number of other ideas, given below in chronological order, which also reflect his views on the respective subjects. One of them has already been implemented.