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The information and expert group "Panorama" evolved from the newspaper "Panorama" which began publication in April 1989. The first year and a half the newspaper was edited without registration under the Soviet rule.
From the very beginning of its existence "Panorama" was specialized in detailed description of the life of new political organisations, the peculiarities of their views, the circumstances of their emergence and development, the specific features of relations between these organisations and processes inside them, making clear the positions of individual political leaders and their comparison. Sometimes the newspaper contained certain material of purely information nature.
From its inception, Panorama specialized in detailed reports on new political organizations and the views of their leaders. As a result, the editors today possess a large store of information on reform and civil society in the former Soviet Union. Among its over 100 publications are: Who's Who in Russian Politics (1993), Dictionary of Political Parties and Organizations in Russia (1992), Guide to Russian Parliament (1995, 1996) etc.
Panorama set up an original hyper-text system for storing and working out data and registered it under the name of LABYRINTH (for IBM-compatible computers). At present the database contains data on the following areas: political parties, public organizations, parliamentary factions, state structures, trade unions, commercial businesses, banks and mass media all over the former Soviet Union; biodata on politicians, top-ranking state officials, outstanding businessmen and other public persons from all the former Soviet Union; data on Russian regions. The data are organized into a system of the cross-referenced files (articles) divided according to the abovementioned areas. LABYRINTH includes a. 25 000 articles (more then 100 Mb). The system can be used in the local networks.
Panorama has established itself not only as one of the leading independent news gathering agencies in Russia today, but as one of the leading Russian think-tanks. Panorama's collaborators has been working as political analysts with the President's administration, Ebert Foundation, Free Trade Unions Institute etc.
Since 1989 Panorama has been paying much attention to the raising of the extreme nationalism in Russia. Our first publication concerning the extreme right was "Pamyat", a commented collection of the extreme nationalists' materials prepared by V.Pribylovski. Over the past for years Panorama has produced several reports on this subject: "Vladimir Zhirinovsky and The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia"(1994), "Russian National Patriotic and Right Radical Organizations" (1994), "Chieftains. Biographies of the Russian Politicians of Nationalistic and Empire Patriotic Wing" (1995), "Russian Nationalistic and Right Radical Organizations. 1989-1995. Documents and Texts" (1995). The pieces on the extreme right has been included also in other publications concerning biographies, parties etc.
From the beginning of 1996 Panorama has produced six comprehensive reports about political extremism and nationalism: "The Political Extremism in Russia", "National-patritic organizations in Russia. History, ideology, extrem tendecies", "Left in Russia. From moderate to extremists", "Nationalism and xenophobia in Russian society", "Ethnic separatism in Russia", "Political Xenophobia". 2000-5000 copies of each were distributed.
The information expert group "Panorama" is headed by Andrei Vasilevsky, Alexander Verkhovsky, Anatoly Papp, Vladimir Pribylovsky and Yekaterina Filippova. The staff includes about twenty researchers.
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