Igor Panarin

Igor Nikolaevich Panarin ( ; born 30 October 1958) He is best known for predicting in 1998 that the United States would disintegrate by 2010. After the date came and went his claim was criticised.

Igor Panarin has written 15 books and a number of articles on information warfare, psychology, and geopolitics. Panarin 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.

Biography Panarin graduated from the Higher Military Command School of Telecommunications of the KGB (now the Academy of Federal Security Guard Service of the Russian Federation) in Oryol and the Division of Psychology of the Lenin Military-Political Academy (with a gold medal). 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. reaching the Colonel rank. to 2007, Panarin was the Press Secretary of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos).

Prof. Panarin started his teaching career in 1989 and has taught in the Moscow State University (MGU), the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO-University), the Russian Academy of Public Administration, and the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, where he has worked since 1999.

As of 2009, Panarin is the dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and appears regularly on Russian television channels.

Views and ideas 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 (when Sergey Kirov was assassinated) Stalin started a process of recreation of the Rus doctrine "Moscow – a Third Rome" in new historical conditions. 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 (which in his view would automatically block its process of integration in NATO) and withdrawal of all Russian funds from the American "financial Titanic", buying gold and creating powerful Russian banks.

Prediction of the United States collapse in 2010 Panarin's prediction of the USA's disintegration (original map). In 1998, based on classified data about the state of the U.S. economy and society supplied to him by fellow analysts at FAPSI,

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.

This hypothesis gained world attention a decade after its initial announcement due to the 2008 financial crisis and has been widely criticised since.

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 (the rouble-denominated oil-trading exchange) has already been implemented.

Informational-psychological subunits in government and military directorates: proposed in 1997; would develop strategic and operational measures to prevent or neutralise attempts to control the psyche of Russian society (i.e. a strategy of psychological defence). A Chief Directorate in Support of Psychological Security would ensure the psychological component of Russian national security. Media and terrorism: In his view, the media are to a certain degree a catalyst for terrorism because terrorist acts of such a volume would be impossible without them; also, the press induces panic in the organs of state authority and affects the public negatively. He proposed Vladimir Putin as the first Prince of the formation, which he renamed in 2009 to Eurasian Union and proposed St Petersburg as its capital by 2012, when in his view only 3 planetary centres of force would exist – the European Union (EU-1), the Eurasian Union (EU-2), and the Chinese Commonwealth. In April 2009 he proposed a second, Southern capital – Alma-Ata. Rouble-denominated oil-trading exchange in Russia: proposed in February 2006. Such an exchange was opened in St Petersburg on 24 September 2008, and as soon as in March 2009, Rosneft (the leader in the Russian oil field and one of the largest public oil companies in the world) sold by auction 7.6 thousands of tonnes of oil products for 97 million roubles. For March, the auction volume amounts to 15–20 thousand tonnes of oil products monthly. Besides Rosneft, other major Russian oil companies like Gazprom Oil, Lukoil, Surgutneftegas, and TNK-BP also plan to go to the exchange, and crude oil trade is expected to start in a few months. Information-ideological geopolitical development concept: proposed in 2008 in his book Information warfare for the future of Russia, New world currency – ACURE: proposed in March 2009. To be based on the three leading world currencies: the Asian Currency Unit (a regional currency basket that was first proposed in 2006 based on the currencies of Japan, China, and South Korea along with the ASEAN group), the rouble, and the euro.