Eduard Shevardnadze

Eduard Amvrosiyevich Shevardnadze was born on January 25, 1928, in the village of Mamati in the Guria region of western Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union ^[1]. His father was a schoolteacher, and the family lived modestly in a rural district known for its tea plantations and its long tradition of political restlessness. Georgia had been absorbed into the USSR in 1921, and Shevardnadze grew up entirely under Soviet rule, coming of age during the Second World War and the last decade of Joseph Stalin, himself a Georgian ^[2].

Rather than follow his father into teaching, the young Shevardnadze chose politics early. He joined the Komsomol, the Communist Party youth organization, in his teens and became a full party member in 1948, at the age of twenty ^[1]. He studied at the party school of the Georgian Central Committee in Tbilisi and later completed a degree in history at the Kutaisi Pedagogical Institute. For anyone asking who was Eduard Shevardnadze before he reached Moscow, the answer lies in these years: a determined provincial functionary who understood that in the Soviet system, the party was the only ladder that mattered ^[2].

Shevardnadze climbed steadily through the Georgian Komsomol during the 1950s, becoming its first secretary in 1957. In the 1960s he moved into police work, an unusual route for an ambitious politician, serving as Georgia's minister of internal affairs from 1965 ^[1]. In that post he built a reputation as a relentless campaigner against corruption in a republic notorious for its black markets and patronage networks. Stories circulated of his theatrical methods, including checks on officials' luxury cars and confiscations of illegally acquired property ^[3].

The anti-corruption drive served him well. In 1972 he was named first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, in effect the ruler of the republic, after helping to bring down his predecessor Vasil Mzhavanadze amid corruption scandals ^[2]. Shevardnadze held the post for thirteen years. He purged thousands of officials, experimented cautiously with economic reforms in agriculture, and cultivated a public image of austerity and discipline. He was also careful to display loyalty to Moscow, famously declaring that for Georgia the sun rose in the north, from Russia ^[3].

During these years he formed a friendship that would change his life. Mikhail Gorbachev, the party boss of the neighboring Stavropol region, shared his frustration with the stagnation of the late Brezhnev era. The two men, both provincial reformers of the same generation, spoke privately about the system's decay long before either had the power to address it ^[4].

In July 1985, four months after becoming Soviet leader, Gorbachev stunned the diplomatic world by appointing Shevardnadze foreign minister of the USSR ^[1]. The choice was startling: Shevardnadze had no diplomatic experience, spoke no foreign languages fluently, and replaced Andrei Gromyko, who had run Soviet foreign policy for twenty-eight years. Western officials soon discovered that the white-haired Georgian was a different kind of Soviet negotiator: informal, humorous, and willing to make real concessions ^[4].

The list of Eduard Shevardnadze achievements from his five and a half years at the foreign ministry is central to the history of the late twentieth century. He was a key negotiator of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons ^[5]. He pushed for and helped manage the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, completed in February 1989. When communist governments across Eastern Europe collapsed in the autumn of 1989, Shevardnadze and Gorbachev refused to intervene with force, and in 1990 he signed the treaty settlements that permitted the reunification of Germany within NATO ^[4]. He built close working relationships with American secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker, and his support for the coalition against Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 marked a decisive break with decades of Soviet policy in the Middle East ^[5].

His tenure ended dramatically. In December 1990, warning that hardliners were gaining ground, Shevardnadze resigned before the Congress of People's Deputies with a public prediction that dictatorship was coming ^[1]. Eight months later, in August 1991, conservative officials attempted a coup against Gorbachev, an event widely seen as vindicating his warning. He briefly returned as Soviet foreign minister in November 1991, weeks before the USSR itself ceased to exist ^[2].

Independent Georgia descended quickly into chaos. Its first elected president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was overthrown in a violent coup in January 1992, and the military council that seized power invited Shevardnadze home in March 1992 to lend the new order legitimacy ^[6]. He became chairman of the State Council and, after elections later that year, head of state as chairman of parliament.

The country he inherited was close to collapse. A separatist war in Abkhazia ended in catastrophic defeat in September 1993, driving roughly a quarter of a million ethnic Georgians from their homes, while another conflict had already detached South Ossetia from Tbilisi's control ^[6]. Supporters of the ousted Gamsakhurdia waged a brief civil war in the west of the country. To survive, Shevardnadze accepted Russian military assistance and brought Georgia into the Commonwealth of Independent States, a concession that many Georgians resented ^[2].

Gradually he restored a measure of order. He disbanded or tamed the paramilitary groups that had terrorized the country, and in 1995 a new constitution created a presidency, which he won by a wide margin in elections that November ^[1]. He survived assassination attempts in 1995 and 1998, including a car bombing and a rocket-propelled grenade attack on his motorcade ^[6].

As second President of Georgia from 1995 to 2003, Shevardnadze steered the country toward the West while trying to avoid an open break with Moscow. His government championed the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which carried Caspian oil across Georgian territory to Turkey and anchored the country in Western energy plans ^[5]. He sought closer ties with NATO and the European Union, accepted American military trainers after 2002, and made Georgia a recipient of substantial United States assistance ^[6].

At home the record was darker. Corruption spread through the state at every level, public salaries and pensions went unpaid, electricity blackouts were routine, and the breakaway regions remained beyond Tbilisi's reach. The reformers Shevardnadze had promoted, including the young justice minister Mikheil Saakashvili, broke with him and moved into opposition ^[7]. He was re-elected in 2000 in a vote criticized by observers, and by his second term his popularity had collapsed.

The end came in November 2003. Parliamentary elections on November 2 were widely judged fraudulent, and weeks of street protests followed. On November 22, demonstrators led by Saakashvili, carrying roses, pushed into the parliament chamber as Shevardnadze attempted to open its first session. The next day, after meeting opposition leaders with Russian mediation, he resigned rather than order force against the crowds ^[7]. The bloodless change of power became known as the Rose Revolution, and it set a template for later popular uprisings in the post-Soviet space.

Shevardnadze married Nanuli Tsagareishvili in 1951, and the couple had a son and a daughter. Nanuli, whose own father had been executed during the Stalinist terror, remained at his side through six decades until her death in 2004, shortly after his fall from power ^[3]. In the early 1990s Shevardnadze, raised as an atheist party official, was baptized into the Georgian Orthodox Church and took the baptismal name Giorgi ^[2].

After resigning he withdrew to his state-provided residence in the Krtsanisi district of Tbilisi, where the new government allowed him to live out his retirement. He gave interviews, worked on his memoirs, and published an autobiography reflecting on both his Soviet career and his troubled presidency ^[3]. In later interviews he defended his record while conceding mistakes, including his statement that leaving office earlier might have served Georgia better.

Eduard Shevardnadze died at home in Tbilisi on July 7, 2014, at the age of 86, after a long illness ^[1]. He was buried beside his wife in the grounds of the residence. Tributes came from Western statesmen who remembered his role in ending the Cold War, while reaction in Georgia itself was more divided, reflecting the two halves of his career ^[7].

Any honest Eduard Shevardnadze biography has to hold two reputations together. Abroad, especially in Germany and the United States, he is remembered as one of the statesmen who ended the Cold War peacefully: the foreign minister who helped free Eastern Europe, unify Germany, and wind down the nuclear arms race ^[4]. German leaders in particular credited him with making reunification possible without bloodshed, and his name remains attached to streets and honors in Germany ^[5].

In Georgia the judgment is harsher and more complicated. He is credited with pulling the country back from state failure in the early 1990s, building institutions, and setting a pro-Western course that his successors continued. He is also blamed for the entrenched corruption, poverty, and electoral manipulation that provoked the Rose Revolution, and for the unresolved loss of Abkhazia and South Ossetia on his watch ^[6].

The basic Eduard Shevardnadze facts sketch a man of extraordinary adaptability: a Stalin-era Komsomol organizer who became a police chief, a Communist Party boss who became a democratizer, a Soviet minister who became the president of an independent state, and an autocrat's heir who left power without violence when the crowds demanded it. Few political lives of the twentieth century crossed so many eras, and few ended with so mixed and consequential a ledger ^[7].