The International Department theorist who designed Soviet Third World policy under Brezhnev
Brutents and the International Department experts judged the 1979 Afghanistan invasion 'stupid.' Their boss Ponomarev, who might have conveyed that view, was excluded from the decisive December meetings.
An Armenian-born Soviet International Department theorist, he was the operational architect of Soviet Third World policy under Brezhnev and early Gorbachev. As First Deputy Head he led the formulation of the 'national democracy' concept, and was one of the few inside the department to argue against the Afghanistan invasion.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1946–1948Psychiatrist, Baku psychiatric hospital
- 1950–1954Lecturer, Baku City Committee of the CPSU
- 1954–1958Postgraduate, Academy of Social Sciences; defends candidate dissertation in 1958
- 1961–1969Head of national-liberation movement department, Problems of Peace and Socialism (Prague)
- 1961–1976Responsible posts in the CC International Department, planning Third World policy
- 1976–1986First Deputy Head, CC International Department
- 1986–1990Candidate member, CPSU Central Committee
- 1997–2017Vice-President, Russian Foreign Policy Association
Related historical events
The National Democracy Theory and the Design of Third World Policy
Brutents' contribution as a theorist lay in giving the International Department a scholarly framework for classifying and drawing in the decolonising 'Third World.' After earning his degree in 1958 with a dissertation on the ideology of 'new' US colonialism, he set out the skeleton of the theory in a run of books: National Liberation Movement of the Peoples of Asia and Africa (1959), Modern Revolutionary Democracy (1968), and Modern National Liberation Revolutions (1974).
A special group he led at the Central Committee from the late 1950s analysed the class structure and liberation struggles of Third World states, drafting party documents and leaders' speeches that, once approved, became official party line. Brutents' core proposition was that the national bourgeoisie was an object of alliance so long as it pursued an independent state and a national market against the colonial power. This supplied the theoretical basis on which 'national democracy' was adopted as official terminology of the world communist movement at the 1960 Moscow meeting, and, paired with the concepts of 'non-capitalist development' and 'socialist orientation,' it ran through to the ideological roots of the ANC in South Africa.
At the same time, he was among the first of the department's theorists to break from dogma. In a series of memoranda to Boris Ponomarev in early 1979, Brutents argued that the building of socialism in the Third World had 'become too much of a Soviet project,' warning that Moscow's habit of substituting its own results for the organic maturation of local revolutionary forces was the cause of failure. Those memoranda sprang from the same root as his internal opposition, later that year, to the invasion of Afghanistan.