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Russian scholar says US will collapse next year

By MIKE ECKEL, Associated Press Writer Mike Eckel, Associated Press Writer

Wed Mar 4, 4:39 am ET

MOSCOW If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't

mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year,

the U.S. will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will

become the backbones of a new world order.

Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the

Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's

state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story

line of the Kremlin leadership.

"There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur

by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at

the Diplomatic Academy a lecture the ministry pointedly invited The

Associated Press and other foreign media to attend.

The prediction from Panarin, a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space

Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, meshes with the negative view of the

U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from

Vladimir Putin.

Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United

States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global

financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly

citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources.

He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest

country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and

cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End"

when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska

will revert to Russian control.

Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great

psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison

population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the

decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking

giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has

collapsed.

"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened

is the collapse of the American dream."

Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia

and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two

nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S.

dollar.

Asked for comment on how the Foreign Ministry views Panarin's theories, a

spokesman said all questions had to be submitted in writing and no answers were

likely before Wednesday.

It wasn't clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked

Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is

undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic

collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise.

Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur."

But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center who

did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia

is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.

"I can't imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart,"

Malashenko told the AP.