Kremlin embraces dire vision for U.S.

MOSCOW — For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the United States will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument — that an economic and moral collapse would trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the country — seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," Panarin said. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."

Panarin, 50, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it's his bleak forecast for the United States that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis.

Panarin, a polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns the outlook for them is dire.

"There's a [55 percent] chance right now that disintegration will occur," he said. "One could rejoice in that process," he added. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario — for Russia."

Although Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he said, its economy would suffer because it depends heavily on the dollar and on U.S. trade.

Panarin says he based his original forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the United States will break into six pieces — with Washington state and much of the West coming under Chinese influence and Alaska reverting to Russian control.

Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," said Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."

Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the United States dismiss Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," said Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies.

Still, interest in the forecast revived this fall when Panarin published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme" and predicted China and Russia would usurp the U.S. role as a global financial regulator.

Americans hope President-elect Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

The article prompted a question at a December news conference about the White House's reaction. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

For Panarin, Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he said.

The professor says he's convinced people are taking his theory more seriously. Others have forecast similar cataclysms, he said, and been right. He cited French political scientist Emmanuel Todd, famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union — 15 years beforehand.

"When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," Panarin said.