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Former Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze dies
By Arkady Ostrovsky
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Eduard Shevardnadze, who has died aged 86, lived at least three political lives.
Communist chief of Soviet Georgia, the last foreign minister of the Soviet Union and then president of the independent Georgian republic, his life spanned borders and eras alike.
In the west he will be remembered as a man who helped to end the cold war, who supported the reform of the Soviet economy and, under Mikhail Gorbachev, changed how Moscow was perceived. He was instrumental in the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the reunification of Germany and Soviet nuclear cuts.
In Georgia his legacy is more mixed. He will be regarded as a former communist leader who returned to a country riven by ethnic conflict and restored relative political and economic stability.
But in the later years of his presidency, Georgia would slide into cronyism and stagnation. He was driven from office by the 2003 “Rose” revolution led by Mikheil Saakashvili.
Before 1985, few outside the Soviet Union had heard of Shevardnadze. When he was appointed foreign minister, George HW Bush, then the US vice-president, remarked: “No one told me beforehand to look out for Mr Shev-what’s-his-name.”
Five years later, when he delivered an emotional resignation speech warning of “creeping dictatorship” returning to the Soviet Union, it made many front pages. Yet his appearance in the international arena was brief compared with his career in Georgia.
Eduard Amvrosiyevich Shevardnadze was born in western Georgia on January 25 1928, the son of a schoolteacher. In 1951, the year he graduated from an elite party school, he married Nanuli Tsagareishvili, whose father was persecuted by the NKVD (the future KGB) and labelled an “enemy of the people”.
Despite this he rose fast through the local Communist ranks and by 1968 was Georgia’s minister of internal affairs, battling organised crime and corruption in a country known for both.
He had a ruthless streak. Nicknamed “white fox of the Caucasus”, he was appointed by Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev as head of the Georgian Communist party and ordered to clean it up. At a party meeting he asked his comrades to raise their left hands. When they did, he is said to have wondered aloud how so many of these modestly paid apparatchiks had an expensive western watch on their wrist.
Under Shevardnadze, Georgia became a testing ground for economic reforms. He introduced productivity-related pay in some agricultural regions; within two years grain productivity had tripled. He attracted foreign capital to build resorts and allowed private restaurants to open. By the early 1980s Georgia was one of the most prosperous Soviet republics, protected by its reputation as a playground for the Moscow elite.
While still a youth leader he had met Mr Gorbachev, then party chief in a nearby southern region of Russia. Walking on a beach by the Black Sea in 1984, the story goes, the two friends plotted the transformation of Soviet economic and international affairs. “When Shevardnadze said that everything had got rotten,” Mr Gorbachev recalled later, “we said we could not go on living the way we lived before.”
Within a few months, Mr Gorbachev was appointed general secretary of the Soviet Communist party and invited Shevardnadze to become foreign minister.
With zero diplomatic background and speaking no western languages, he was an unlikely choice. But his smile and charm helped the thaw.
Shevardnadze forged close friendships with two successive US secretaries of state, George Shultz and James Baker, as well as with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister. He supported and help negotiate the reunification of Germany, thus he became popular in Germany.
But success abroad did not win him sympathy at home, where he was blamed for “selling out to the west” and “betraying Russia's national interest”. Fighting hardliners in Moscow turned out to be a harder task than ending the cold war.
His resignation speech of 1990 came as a bombshell. “Dictatorship is coming. I state this with complete responsibility. No one knows what kind of dictatorship this will be and who will come – what kind of dictator, and what the regime will be like.”
Six years after he left Georgia, Shevardnadze returned to a country impoverished by civil conflict. Two regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, were attempting to break away. He set about restoring order – though a war in Abkhazia was ended only through a deal allowing Russian military bases on Georgia’s soil.
Yet Russia’s 1998 economic crisis choked off a Georgian recovery, corruption corroded the state and electricity shortages became common.
Mass protests followed alleged vote-rigging in 2003 elections, after which Shevardnadze agreed in talks with opposition leaders and Igor Ivanov, Russian foreign minister, to stand down. After his wife’s death he lived out his days quietly in a villa on the edge of the capital Tbilisi.
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