TBILISI
Eduard Shevardnadze was a hero in the West for helping to end the Cold War as the last Soviet foreign minister, before suffering a dramatic fall from grace as president of his native Georgia.
The veteran statesman, who died on Monday aged 86, won the highest praise for his time as former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief diplomat, when he negotiated arms-reduction treaties with the United States and brokered the deal that brought down the Berlin Wall.
“I am not sure that the Cold War could have ended peacefully without him. He changed all our lives ... The man’s a hero,” former US Secretary of State James Baker, who spent long hours at the negotiating table with Shevardnadze, said in 2000.
But his overthrow in Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution saw thousands dancing and singing in the streets of the capital Tbilisi, in scenes eerily reminiscent of the celebrations that Shevardnadze helped spark more than a decade earlier in Berlin, Prague and other eastern European cities.
His 10 years as leader of Georgia left the country mired in poverty and chaos. Shevardnadze salvaged what remained of his reputation only by stepping down in 2003 in the face of mass protests, avoiding the bloodshed many feared if he had tried to cling to power.
Shevardnadze was born January 25, 1928 in the provincial village of Mamati, as Stalin, a fellow Georgian, was consolidating his firm grip on the Soviet Union.
He joined the Communist Party at age 20 and began a rapid rise through the ranks. He became Georgia’s interior minister in 1968 and four years later was appointed first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party. During this time he oversaw both a daring anti-corruption drive and the brutal repression of political dissidents.
In 1978, he was promoted to the Soviet politburo in Moscow where, a year later, Gorbachev would become its youngest member. The two shared a firm belief that the Soviet Union was in dire need of reform and when Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985, he named Shevardnadze his foreign minister.
Shevardnadze became the face of Gorbachev’s daring new foreign policy, playing a leading role in ground-breaking negotiations with the United States on nuclear arms reductions. “Shevy”, as he came to be affectionately called in Washington, was hailed as the most liberal foreign minister in Soviet history.
His decisive moment as foreign minister came in the late 1980s when he rejected the pleas of eastern European Communist leaders for Soviet intervention to prop up their regimes, leading to a series of pro-democracy revolts, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany.
Inside the Soviet Union, he struggled with Communist hardliners trying to derail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. He resigned a year before the Soviet Union collapsed but returned briefly to his post as foreign minister in the regime’s dying months.
His native Georgia, meanwhile, was in turmoil. The country’s first post-Soviet president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, lasted only a few months before being deposed in a coup. A long and bloody civil war seemed inevitable.
Flush with his success abroad, Shevardnadze stepped in as chairman of Georgia’s State Council. Wars with separatists in the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were lost, but Shevardnadze was credited with holding the rest of the country together despite the odds.
He was elected president in 1995 and initial signs were hopeful. He drafted a Western-style constitution and Georgia attracted aid from the US and Europe.
Troubling signs remained — attempts were made on Shevardnadze’s life in 1995 and 1998. But the country appeared on the right track and Shevardnadze was nicknamed “the Silver Fox” for his ability to survive one political crisis after another.
By the time he was re-elected president in 2000, hopes had been dashed. Critics said Shevardnadze had allowed powerful criminal gangs to run rampant in exchange for political loyalty. Crime and corruption were out of control and the state, unable to collect taxes, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Living standards plummeted and public services collapsed.
The turning point came in late 2003, when parliamentary polls were rigged to give the pro-government bloc victory. Georgians took to the streets by the thousands, rallying outside parliament to demand fresh elections.
As the demonstrations intensified and the world’s attention focused on Tbilisi, Shevardnadze at first refused to step down. Soldiers and police gathered near the capital and there were fears of a heavy crackdown. But then opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili, who would take Shevardnadze’s place, announced on the steps of parliament that the president had agreed to go peacefully.
Shevardnadze was granted amnesty and a small government pension. He was invited to live in Germany, where he was still greatly respected for his role in bringing down the Berlin Wall.
But he instead retired to a government residence in Tbilisi to write his memoirs. He spent his final years there surrounded by framed photos of old friends and past glories, indulging his memories of the time when he helped to shape the fate of Europe.
