Eduard Shevardnadze, Foreign Minister Under Gorbachev, Dies at 86
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who as Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s foreign minister helped hone the “new thinking,” foreign and domestic, that transformed and ultimately rent the Soviet Union, then led his native Georgia through its turbulent start as an independent state, died on Monday. He was 86.

His spokeswoman, Marina Davitashvili, confirmed the death but gave no details.

Mr. Shevardnadze was forced from office in 2003 in what was called the Rose Revolution, in which Georgians vented their frustration with the corrupt post-Soviet system that he had presided over and under which he had grown wealthy. His ouster set in motion a period of government reform that saw Georgia become a darling of the West under his successor, Mikheil Saakashvili.

Mr. Shevardnadze had spent his working life as a Communist official when Mr. Gorbachev called him on June 30, 1985, with a proposition that startled him: Would he manage the foreign policy of one of the two most powerful countries in the world?

As he recounted the call in his memoir, “The Future Belongs to Freedom” (1991), Mr. Shevardnadze stammered that he had no experience in diplomacy, other than hosting foreign delegations as the top Communist official in the Soviet republic of Georgia. He had visited just nine countries and spoke no foreign languages. Besides, he asked Mr. Gorbachev, shouldn’t the foreign minister be Russian?

“The issue is already decided,” Mr. Gorbachev answered. Mr. Shevardnadze was to report to work the next day.

“The decision to make Shevardnadze foreign minister was the first obvious display of Gorbachev’s remarkable political creativity,” Robert G. Kaiser wrote in “Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs, His Failure, and His Fall” (1991).

In his memoir, Mr. Gorbachev, whose title was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, said that “experienced people” had understood his thinking: He had assured himself “a free hand in foreign policy by bringing in a close friend and associate.”

Together, the two men revolutionized Soviet foreign policy. They withdrew troops from Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union had waged a fruitless war; negotiated treaties on medium-range and strategic nuclear arms; took military forces out of Europe and away from the China border; allowed the reunification of Germany; and accepted human rights as part of policy discussions.

Mr. Shevardnadze was architect, spokesman and negotiator for the new policy, and the white-haired visage that earned him the nickname Silver Fox was nearly ubiquitous on the world stage from 1985 to 1991. The magazine The New Leader said in 2004 that his diplomatic accomplishments had been equal to those of Mr. Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan.

Part of his success was forging relationships with Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III, who became proponents of reconciliation in intensely anti-Soviet administrations (Mr. Shultz under Reagan, Mr. Baker under the elder George Bush). Just as difficult, he helped convince Soviet hard-liners that it was time for rapprochement with the United States.

Mr. Shevardnadze was in the process of renouncing Communism, which he had come to believe was both wrong and doomed. In 1988, he was the first Soviet official to say that the clash with capitalism no longer mattered — an act of “true ‘sedition’ in the eyes of the official ideologues,” Mr. Gorbachev said in his book “Memoirs” (1995).

Mr. Shevardnadze’s revisionist thinking outpaced that of Mr. Gorbachev. “He thought he was refining socialism while I was no longer a socialist,” Mr. Shevardnadze told The New York Times Magazine in 1993.

Mr. Shevardnadze became worried that Mr. Gorbachev was falling under the influence of the hard-liners. He ultimately shocked his boss by resigning on Dec. 20, 1990, warning, “Dictatorship is coming.” After a botched coup attempt by hard-liners in August 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved itself on Dec. 26, 1991, a victim of economic chaos, political opposition from many of its constituent republics and turmoil in the Kremlin.

Three months later, Mr. Shevardnadze agreed to head the council governing Georgia after a coup there. He was elected president in 1995 and helped hold his country together as it established democratic reforms and stabilized the economy.

He survived assassination attempts in 1992, 1995 and 1998 without suffering serious injury. The first two attempts involved car bombs; in one, Mr. Shevardnadze was leaving the inner courtyard of the Parliament building in Tbilisi, the capital, when a four-wheel-drive vehicle exploded nearby. The third attempt was an ambush by 10 to 15 armed men in which two presidential body guards and one attacker were killed.

His second term, won in 2000, was a disaster, as armed civil clashes proliferated, the economy deteriorated, and cronyism and corruption flourished. Mr. Shevardnadze resigned in November 2003, after protesters’ chants of “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

The proximate cause of his fall was his involvement in rigged elections in 2002 and 2003, a violation of the electoral reform laws that he himself had sponsored. His own Supreme Court invalidated the elections.

In a television interview after being driven from office, Mr. Shevardnadze no longer spoke of perestroika or glasnost, the Russian words for rebuilding and openness that Mr. Gorbachev had popularized.

“It is not good to have too much democracy,” he said. “I think that was a mistake.”

His successor, Mr. Saakashvili, said in a telephone interview on Monday that Mr. Shevardnadze had played an “immense” role in “establishing the post-Cold War order,” and that as Georgia’s first post-Soviet president, he had steered the country toward democracy, setting it apart from other former Soviet republics. “He managed to create a more open atmosphere, that gave more intellectual freedom here,” Mr. Saakashvili added.

But he noted that Mr. Shevardnadze had incurred resentment as his family accumulated extraordinary wealth.

“When he came back to Georgia, in many ways he was a tired man,” said Mr. Saakashvili, who left office as Georgia’s president in 2013. “There was lots of corruption. There was lots of criminality. People remember it as a time when a lot of people in Georgia could not get a lot of electricity. By the time he ended his presidency, he was very wealthy — his family was the wealthiest — and that’s a fact of life. It was a very complex time, and it’s up to history to judge.”

Eduard Amvrosiyevich Shevardnadze was born in the village of Mamati, Georgia, on Jan. 25, 1928. His father was a Russian language teacher who was arrested in Stalin’s purges but saved by a friend in the secret police. The boy threw himself into Communist youth activities and considered Communism his religion. He joined the party in 1948.

Resisting his parents’ wishes that he go to medical school, he became a political instructor for Komsomol, the Communist youth organization. While on vacation in 1951 at a Georgian resort, Mr. Shevardnadze met Nanuli Tsagareyshvili, a counselor at a camp for Pioneers, the Communist youth organization for teenagers. He was told by a high-ranking party official that he should not marry her because her father had been arrested as an enemy of the people. The official said that Mr. Shevardnadze would become “a pariah, an outcast,” Mr. Shevardnadze wrote in his memoir.

They wed nevertheless, in 1951. “Why must I sacrifice my love to hatred?” he wrote.

She died in 2004. Mr. Shevardnadze is believed to be survived by his son, Pata; his daughter, Monana; and four grandchildren.

While working for Komsomol, Mr. Shevardnadze graduated from the Higher Party School of the Communist Party of Georgia, and earned a teaching degree through a correspondence school. He became head of the Georgian Komsomol in 1956 and began his rise through the ranks.

In 1965 he was appointed minister of public order in Georgia and, in 1968, interior minister. Both were security positions under the K.G.B. He developed a reputation for toughness, even cruelty, and was said to torture prisoners.

He was also a vocal foe of Georgia’s rampant corruption. On his first day as minister of public order, according to a story circulating at the time, he asked senior officials for a show of hands. He then ordered everyone displaying an expensive black-market watch to turn it in.

In 1972, Mr. Shevardnadze flew to Moscow with a suitcase full of evidence of the corruption of Georgian leadership to show the Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev. He was rewarded with the job of first secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia. In 1976, he was named to the central committee of the national Communist Party, and two years later became a nonvoting member of the ruling Politburo.

Meanwhile he built a network of connections, cultivating top party officials vacationing in Georgia. He became a protégé of Yuri Andropov, the longest-serving head of the K.G.B., who succeeded Mr. Brezhnev as the Soviet leader.

Mr. Shevardnadze met Mr. Gorbachev in the mid-1960s, when the two were Komsomol officials. They immediately liked each other and began meeting in Moscow, in Georgia and in the Stavropol region, where Mr. Gorbachev led a Komsomol branch.

“Gradually, unnoticed to ourselves, we opened up to each other, beginning to confide our secret thoughts,” Mr. Shevardnadze wrote. In 1979, after both men learned about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from newspapers, they privately agreed that it was “a fatal error,” in Mr. Shevardnadze’s words.

As foreign minister, Mr. Shevardnadze succeeded Andrei A. Gromyko, who in holding the post for a generation had exemplified the dour image of Soviet diplomats. He took the job with Mr. Gromyko’s approval, which Mr. Gorbachev had won through flattery and a promise to appoint Mr. Gromyko to the ceremonial position of head of state.

Mr. Shevardnadze quickly showed diplomatic aplomb. On his first day, he told his deputies: “Who am I compared to Gromyko, the battleship of world foreign policy? I am just a rowboat. But with a motor.”

One of his last acts in the job was to persuade Russia’s leadership to support a United Nations resolution on Nov. 29, 1990, giving the United States and its allies the green light to drive Iraq from Kuwait. Hard-liners were taken aback, blaming Mr. Shevardnadze’s close relationship with Secretary of State Baker. Mr. Baker once sang “Georgia on My Mind” to his friend “Shevy” in a meeting at Jackson Hole, Wyo.

After Mr. Shevardnadze resigned, in 1990, Mr. Gorbachev tried several times to persuade him to return as foreign minister. He finally did, in November 1991, for what turned out to be the Soviet Union’s final month.

In March 1992, Mr. Shevardnadze was summoned by Georgia’s ruling council to try to bring order to the country after a coup had removed President Zviad K. Gamsakhurdia. He told The Times Magazine that he had known he “was jumping into a caldron” when he accepted the post of chairman of the State Council of Georgia.

Mr. Shevardnadze remained in Georgia after his resignation as president, and commented on Georgian and global affairs as an elder statesman.

“Picasso had his different periods, and other artists, too,” he told The Times in 1992, before his second career as president of the new Georgia.

“I made mistakes, I was sometimes unfair, but what was one supposed to do — stick with one position to the end? To the death? We have all changed.”

冷戰終結者 喬治亞前總統謝瓦納茲逝世

協助推倒柏林圍牆和終結冷戰的喬治亞前總統謝瓦納茲的發言人七日說，長期臥病的謝瓦納茲已去世，享壽八十六。謝瓦納茲是前蘇聯末代外長，被視為讓冷戰和平落幕英雄，但在喬治亞總統任內卻被「玫瑰革命」人民運動趕下台，評價兩極。

謝瓦納茲在前蘇聯最後幾年擔任外長，是當時蘇聯總書記戈巴契夫新外交政策的掌門人。戈巴契夫對「好友」逝世表示哀悼，他說：「他對改革時期的外交政策有很大貢獻，是全球事務新思維的真正擁護者。」

謝瓦納茲在1980年代末民主風潮席捲東歐時，拒絕東歐共黨領袖要蘇聯出兵鎮壓的請求，導致1989年柏林圍牆倒塌，東歐共產政權一個接一個被民主革命推翻。

謝瓦納茲並在1990年協助促成兩德統一的協商，德國人迄今仍十分感激他。他還促成1989年蘇聯自阿富汗撤軍，並與美國展開裁減核武談判。一頭白髮的謝瓦納茲機智幽默，西方領袖折服於他的魅力，當時華府人士暱稱謝瓦納茲「小謝」，認為他是蘇聯史上最自由派的外長。

曾在談判桌上與謝瓦納茲交手的美國前國務卿貝克曾表示：「若沒他（謝瓦納茲），我不確定冷戰是否能和平落幕。他改變我們所有人生活，是位英雄。」

蘇聯1991年解體後，謝瓦納茲返回家鄉喬治亞，1995年當選總統，並在2000年連任。他經歷兩次暗殺，包括他的座車遭到反戰車武器攻擊。許多觀察家認為，這些暗殺澆熄了謝瓦納茲的改革動力，此後他只對繼續掌權有興趣。在他治理之下，喬治亞犯罪和貪汙失控，黑幫猖狂，政府收不到稅，瀕臨破產。

2003年11月，國會選舉舞弊引發大規模示威，但謝瓦納茲並未下令鎮壓，三周後群眾闖進國會，趕走正在發表談話的謝瓦納茲，反對派領袖宣布他已同意下台。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/world/europe/eduard-shevardnadze-soviet-foreign-minister-under-gorbachev-is-dead-at-86.html

2014-07-08．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯田思怡