In 1995, after an assassination attempt in Georgia. Credit Associated Press (1)

After the Soviet collapse in 1991 Mr Shevardnadze headed home to Georgia, where independence had brought bloody strife and economic collapse. Though he became the only politician to have been foreign minister of one country and head of state of another, his record was at best mixed. He eventually ended the fighting, jailing two of the warlords who had put him in power, sidelining the third, and escaping several assassination attempts.
But for all his courage, skill and brains, he had always been better at preaching democracy than practising it. Though not personally corrupt, he ruled through an intricate web of favours and blackmail. For many Georgians, sleaze and stagnation soon came to outweigh stability.

Postscript: Eduard Shevardnadze, 1928-2014

Eduard Shevardnadze, the man who helped to end the Cold War and who died this weekend, at the age of eighty-six, entered my consciousness on a cold winter evening in 1992, the year that Georgia, where I was born, fell apart. Separatists were at war in the provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; in the capital, Tbilisi, snipers had moved onto the roofs of the old city. Until 1991, we had lived in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Now Tbilisi burned, riven by warring militiamen who couldn’t agree on the country’s independent future. Breadlines stretched for hours. There was no electricity or running water, and—to my great delight at the time—there was no school.

We were sitting around the kitchen table playing Monopoly with real money—hyperinflation had made the post-Soviet currency “coupon” useless for anything else. The phone rang and my mother picked it up; in the dim light of a kerosene lamp, I could see the tension on her face. The phone always brought bad news: kidnappings, deaths, goodbyes from friends who had found a way to leave. But this time, as she listened to the voice on the other end of the line, my mother’s expression grew lighter, her tone more hopeful. When she finally hung up, she paused for effect before triumphantly delivering the news: Shevardnadze, she told us, was coming home.

Shevardnadze was a rock star of Cold War politics and a co-architect, with Mikhail Gorbachev, of perestroika. As Gorbachev’s foreign minister, he was instrumental in bringing about some of the era’s most radical changes: the pullout of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the demilitarization of Eastern Europe, and the reunification of Germany, something that Soviet leaders had previously opposed. His wit, charisma, and courage won over Western leaders. Then, in 1990, acting on his disillusionment in a way that Gorbachev never did, he stood up in front of the Communist Party Congress and, in a dramatic speech, resigned from his post, because, he said, reform was failing and “dictatorship is advancing.” Now he was going back to his homeland, Georgia.

Georgians were waiting, anxiously. Many of them repeated a joke: Two men are dragging a statue of Shevardnadze up a steep hill. “Why do you bother?” a passerby asks. “Just leave him down below and he’ll climb up himself.” The joke expressed a common hope. Shevardnadze, as Georgians saw it, was born in a small village, the son of a teacher, and joined the Communist Party at the age of twenty and then ascended global heights. They wanted him to do so again and bring the country with him.

He brought bitter disappointment. Instead of prosperity, he ushered in a decade of corruption, nepotism, and missed opportunities. Every achievement of Shevardnadze’s rule was offset by a great failure: He ended a civil war, but allowed lawlessness and violent crime to rule. He signed some pro-Western reforms, but Georgia approached the very top of Transparency International’s corruption index. His connections in the West helped him turn Georgia into one of the largest per-capita recipients of U.S. aid, but little of it reached the population. He introduced the national currency, the lari, but the economy was in tatters.

“May he rest in peace, but for me Shevardnadze will always equal humiliation,” my neighbor Maya Kipiani told me, on the day Shevardnadze passed away in Tbilisi. I’d asked her what he’d meant to her. Maya, who is retired, received a pension that, in the Shevardnadze years, was worth just seven dollars a month. What hurt even more, she told me, was when Shevardnadze’s wife, Nanuli Shevardnadze, announced on state television that a good housewife should be able to manage just fine with that kind of money. “They didn’t think we were human. They laughed at us.”

For Maya, like for tens of thousands of others, the breaking point came in 2003, when Shevardnadze’s party rigged a parliamentary election. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, and on November 22nd a group of demonstrators, waving roses as a sign of their nonviolent intent, broke into parliament just as Shevardnadze was about to address the chamber. His bodyguards rushed him out of the building through a back door. Seconds later, the thirty-six-year-old opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili took his place on the stage. He gulped down Shevardnadze’s cup of tea, slammed the cup against the desk, and, still waving a rose, announced that the revolution had won.

A few months after the Rose Revolution, I interviewed Shevardnadze for the BBC, in the residence on top of a hill that he was allowed to keep after resigning. Babu (“grandfather”), as Georgians called him, looked old and fragile.

“Americans built this house for me; the walls are bulletproof. You are very safe here,” he said, smiling. Shevardnadze had survived assassination attempts in 1995 and 1998, and Americans, he told me, made sure that he became the best-protected President in the world. As we spoke, pictures of James Baker, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan looked down from the walls. I asked him whether he felt betrayed when the West had a change of heart and didn’t support him during his last battle for power.

“No,” he said. “Americans are like that. They like to back the opposition.” It could have been different, he added, if he had kept a tighter grip on the country. “Democracy was my main goal. Often power is tempting. It’s tempting to slam your fist against the table and make people scared of you. And if I had done it, this [revolution] would not have happened.”

“But my biggest achievement was that I fought the temptation. I was a Communist and I became the man of democratic principles,” he told me. He got annoyed with me for challenging him on issues like the freedom of the press. But he was keen to talk about his role in ending the Soviet war in Afghanistan and in bringing down the Berlin Wall. Germans, he told me, had invited him to move to Berlin, but he wanted to stay home, close to the grave of his wife, which he visited frequently.

Obituary

Eduard Shevardnadze

Eduard Shevardnadze, Soviet foreign minister and then president of Georgia, died on July 7th aged 86