Former President of Georgia and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze has died at the age of 86 in Tbilisi. Shevardnadze’s family and personal press service have officially confirmed the news.
President Vladimir Putin has expressed “deep condolences” to the Shevardnadze family and all the Georgian people on the occasion of death of the politician, informed presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov.
The first and only Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said he’s
devastated by the death of a man he believed to be his friend,
“a bright character with truly Georgian temper.”
“Shevardnadze used to be big-league politician. He made a
great contribution to perestroika policies, a devout supporter of
new ways of thinking in international relations”, Gorbachev
added according to Interfax.
As the last foreign minister of the Soviet Union, Eduard
Shevardnadze was one of the major figures who prepared and set in
motion the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Shevardnadze was Georgian president from 1995 till 2003 and was
ousted from office as a result of the Rose Revolution that ended
in electing Mikhail Saakashvili Georgia’s new leader.
Eduard Shevardnadze was born in the village of Mamati in the
Soviet Republic of Georgia January 25, 1928.
In 1959 he graduated from Kutaisi Pedagogical Institute with a
history degree.
Shevardnadze joined the Communist Party early and passed all
stages of party functionary and in 1972 became the Number 1
apparatchik in Georgia and headed the republic.
After Mikhail Gorbachev announced a campaign for changes
(‘perestroika’) in the Soviet Union, he appointed Shevardnadze
foreign minister of the USSR.
With Eduard Shevardnadze in ministerial chair, the Soviet Union normalized relations with the US, ended the Cold War, agreed on reunification of Germany and dismissed the Warsaw Pact military union.
"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.
Shevardnadze, dubbed ‘Shevy’ by American politicians, played a key role in nuclear arms reduction negotiations with the United States.
He was among the first Soviet leaders to recognize the
disintegration of the Soviet Union.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eduard Shevardnadze
returned to Georgia, which had lost its first President Zviad
Gamsakhurdia, who was ousted and murdered in a bloody internal
conflict.
Shevardnadze managed to stop the civil war at home, serving the
chairman of the parliament and heading the country starting from
October 1992.
In November 1995 he was elected president with 82 percent of
votes.
During Shevardnadze’s years as head of state, two conflicts with
separatist regions within Georgia took place. The conflict with
Abkhazia (1992-1994) and South Ossetia (1991-1992) were both
ended with the help of Russia, which provided peacekeepers for
the region.
In November 2003, opposition leaders accused Eduard Shevardnadze
of falsifying the results of parliamentary elections and
commenced the protest later dubbed the Rose Revolution. As a
result Shevardnadze resigned on November 23, 2003.
After his resignation, Shevardnadze lived in Moscow for several
years, working on his memoirs.