INTELLIGENCE: Collapse of USSR: Geopolitical disaster of the 20th century -Prof. Igor Panarin,

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Collapse of USSR: Geopolitical disaster of the 20th century -Prof. Igor Panarin,

FROM Heikki Sipilä FROM FINLAND

Collapse of USSR: Geopolitical disaster of the 20th century
June 26, 1991, was the day I saw the first and only president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, up close for the first time. That was at the traditional graduation party held by Soviet military academies in the Kremlin. I, then KGB Major I.N. Panarin, had graduated from the Lenin Military Political Academy magna cum laude, and therefore had the honor to represent the thousands-strong staff of the Academy at the Kremlin ball.

Mikhail Gorbachev was walking between the tables, among officers and generals standing near them. As he walked past me, I saw his eyes, cold and darting… there was a zone of gloomy emptiness surrounding him. My admiration of him (a young, energetic leader who knew how to make public speeches and called for innovations) that appeared in 1985 had vanished by late 1988, since there were many words, but few deeds.

Despite everything that happened in the country after 1988, after my own disappointment and the disappointment of tens of millions of Soviet people for whom Gorbachev had been the man capable of putting the USSR on the path to modernization and innovation, I had no idea, of course, that I was attending the last graduation party of Soviet military academies in the Kremlin.

Between 1988 and 1991, the crisis had been growing deeper and difficult questions kept arising, not only in my mind. In 1989, Moscow was buzzing with political activity, although few people had any idea what was going on.

Why did the USSR cease to exist in December 1991, and what must be done to make sure the Belovezha story never repeats in Russia? These are the questions that I have been asking myself for many years now. I have also asked myself if the collapse of the USSR was inevitable. The answer has always been "no".

This is the question that has always burned in my mind: how could a country fall apart whose army, in response to NATO aggression, needed just three days to reach the English Channel after trouncing the adversary? That was real. And the adversary (the British Empire and the USA) knew that, which is why none of FIVE carefully-devised plans (UNTHINKABLE, DROPSHOT etc.) of attacking the USSR was never implemented. Militarily, the USSR was undefeatable. It lost a very special war – the information war.

After the informational and ideological defeat, the USSR´s tank groups and perfectly-trained paratrooper and special operations units were pulled out of Europe without battle and then dissolved. Why did that happen? I think that the collapse of the USSR was not predetermined. So what was the cause of the key geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century?

Eventually, I arrived at the conclusion that the USSR collapsed as a result of a global information war, waged against it systemically and purposefully since August 1943. The results of the informational war against the USSR were attained largely due to the fact that its doctrine was changing constantly, depending on counteractions from the USSR and changes in international relations. After the death of Stalin, the system of informational counteraction was disrupted. The Central Committee and the KGB were acting routinely; the opponent´s true intentions in the sphere of ideology were revealed, but the countermeasures taken were obviously insufficient.

The Soviet Union´s opponents scored a major political victory as Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR. Gorbachev´s appointment as Secretary General was a strategic mistake by the Communist Party´s Central Committee and the KGB. But at the same time, it was a victory for those who had backed and promoted Gorbachev, the Globalist-Trotskyite that he was.

It was another Globalist-Trotskyite, Nikita Khrushchev, who initially embarked on this road toward defeat by dismantling the Stalinist counter-intelligence system, which used to oversee the activities of the nation´s supreme officials and governing bodies. This led to the emergence of "bad sheep" among the top Soviet bureaucracy over time, and Western intelligence services were fast to turn their sights on such weak links within the Soviet government, correctly identifying them as windows of opportunity.

The strategic influence operation aimed at installing Gorbachev as the Soviet leader started in 1946. It was US diplomat George F. Kennan who laid out the guidelines for this formidable long-term strategy in his "Long Telegram" from Moscow to Washington in 1946. It was Kennan who first noted that US special services should step up their activities whenever a change of leadership occurred in the Soviet Union following the death of another supreme leader. Allen Dulles embraced this notion. I wonder if Russia´s present-day youth are aware of this fact while they are being used by outside forces as a tool meant to undermine Russia´s nationhood.

Gorbachev was handpicked by the General Staff of the anti-Soviet information warfare campaign back in the 1970s as a potential Soviet leader to avert the Union´s self-destruction. He was not the only candidate, but he was the most promising in terms of his personal features. That is why he was assisted while climbing up the complicated hierarchy of the Communist Party´s Central Committee.

Gorbachev was supervised by the West for many years, although he might have only discovered it himself as late as 1984, when he met with Ms. Margaret Thatcher in London. Being highly prone to influence, Gorbachev was capable of channeling the USSR´s problems towards its eventual collapse and disintegration.

Russia´s present-day citizens and political elite should be aware that the main reason behind the geopolitical disaster of 1991 was the Soviet Union´s defeat by the information warfare campaign that had been waged for 48 years. The breakup of the USSR brought us few benefits. Meanwhile, what we lost was a common environment for integration that had been formed in Eurasia for many centuries.

In the autumn of 2004, I saw Mikhail Gorbachev in person for the second time in my life, as he chaired a conference of his Gorbachev Foundation, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Perestroika, and I was among the 200 participants. Following the presentations of many panelists who commented on the Perestroika´s eventual failure, I asked for the floor and told Gorbachev, looking straight into his face, that I consider him personally responsible for the Perestroika fiasco and the subsequent collapse of the USSR.

Mr. Gorbachev took those comments painfully and spent the last 30 minutes of his concluding remarks haranguing pointlessly. Every now and then he would turn to me halfway and start lamenting that "some people are still stuck in Cold War trenches." No names called, but the object of his rebuke was apparent.

Gorbachev´s eyes were cold and shifty in 2004, just as they had been in 1991. There was no sense of remorse or guilt in his eyes for the tens of millions of Soviet citizens whom he had thrust into a maelstrom of clashes, poverty and degradation. All you could see in Gorbachev´s eyes was the sore expression of a man who did not get his credit for his Herostratus-like contribution to world history.

Prof. Igor Panarin,
Doctor of Politica