Eduard Shevardnadze

Biography

Eduard Shevardnadze was born in 1928 in Mamati, in Soviet Georgia, the son of a teacher and party official. He joined the Communist Party in 1948 and rose through the Georgian Komsomol to become its First Secretary. Demoted in 1961, he returned as party chief of a Tbilisi district, made his name by exposing corruption, and in 1965 became interior minister of the Georgian SSR.

Appointed First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party in 1972, he led the republic for thirteen years with campaigns against corruption and economic experiments such as the Abasha agricultural reform, and in 1978 reached a compromise that kept Georgian as the republic's sole official language. In July 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev made him Soviet foreign minister and a full Politburo member. He became the face of Gorbachev's foreign policy, negotiating arms treaties with the United States, helping end the war in Afghanistan, accepting German reunification and withdrawing Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. He resigned in December 1990, warning that dictatorship was coming, and returned for the last weeks of the Soviet Union.

Invited back to Georgia after Zviad Gamsakhurdia was overthrown, he chaired the State Council from March 1992 and parliament from that November. His first years were marked by losing wars in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and by a civil war won only after he took Georgia into the Commonwealth of Independent States in return for Russian help. He founded the Union of Citizens of Georgia in 1993, won the presidential elections of 1995 and 2000, survived several assassination attempts and turned Georgia toward NATO.

Corruption and a disputed parliamentary election in November 2003 led to the Rose Revolution, and he resigned on 23 November 2003. He wrote his memoirs and died in Tbilisi in 2014.