Shev’s Way and the History of Europe

I can think of no more fitting introduction to this profile in leadership on Eduard Shevardnadze than to share how I felt at that moment in between the end of the recollection and note‑taking phase and before the onset of the phase in which one begins to actually write. I intuited right away that I could not hope to draft a full‑on, comprehensive portrait of Georgia’s “Babu” (Grandfather) or, as Westerners called him, the “Silver Fox.” He remains too grand of a figure—an exalted member of the pantheon of great statesmen: architects of world affairs, people who made an out­standing impact on international relations. Such people are titans of world politics, true leaders one and all.

People like Eduard Shevardnadze—or Shev, as those of us who were fortunate enough to work closely with him called him between our­selves—helped launch the world into that complex, comprehensive, and yes, frequently tumultuous process of coming to grips with the end of the Cold War and the beginning of something new and better. Unsur­prisingly, in doing all this, people like Shevardnadze never overlooked the strategic interests of their own countries and of their respective po­litical and ideological systems, clashing and harshly debating over them with each other but still trying to keep an essential balance. In so doing, they were able to provide not just a foundation but a substantive context for the value‑based principles, standards, and practices that continue to inform the world of today.

So no, this portrait will not be comprehensive. I hope, rather, and in sincere humility, that what follows will come to be considered as a reflection and reminiscence on some episodes in the life of this unique individual—concrete events and developments that I either personally wit­nessed or in which I participated by virtue of the positions I held at the time.

Shevardnadze was my men­tor, a person who introduced me to the art of diploma­cy and the quintessence of foreign policymaking of a sovereign Georgia and, in general, of how to proper­ly and realistically harness Georgia’s capacity, potential, and resources.

As a consequence of all this, in the profile that follows my biases ought to be made clear at the onset: I liked and admired the man; Shevardnadze was my mentor, a person who introduced me to the art of diplomacy and the quintessence of foreign policymaking of a sovereign Georgia and, in general, of how to properly and realistically harness Georgia’s capacity, potential, and resources. And he did all this—I learnt all this, or at least as much as I could—in a fully confused and misbalanced world order that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union; and he was able to do all this because he understood he could not change (much less oppose) those new realities and perspectives, but only work from them as givens in order to find an appropriate and applicable niche so as to make Georgia’s capability—and its institutional or collective memory— valuable, useful, and convenient for partners and allies alike.

Shevardnadze conveyed meticulously to his counterparts and asso­ciates that Georgia could not survive alone—that regional security and stability are indivisible, interconnected, intertwined, and interdepen­dent. Shevardnadze was always reminding those of us who worked closely under him to stay realistic, rational, and pragmatic—to never lose our sensitivity to the geopolitical circumstances in which we found ourselves. In other words, Shevardnadze continuously insisted that we keep our wits about us and look into Georgia’s future with a clear sense of our own legacy combined with a Realpolitik assessment of our perspectives.

Once, in an address to the UN General Assembly, Shevardnadze described Georgia as a country “crucified at its geopolitical crest.” The reasoning that had gone into that description led him to urge us unceasingly to keep in mind Georgia’s “special geography,” as he put it: our own neighborhood and its vicinity, as well as our centuries‑old own collective and institutional memory—deeply‑imbued in our genetic code—that had preserved, even saved, the Georgian people in its dealings with the outside world.

However, Shevardnadze—who continuously instructed us in how to think through the consequences of our history and heritage—always endeavored to steer his countrymen in a direction that looked to the future. He spoke of the importance of materializing our national legacy—of leveraging and building on it—while always paying heed to resist the temptation to drag Georgia back into a modern‑day pursuit of what he once called “glorious historical triumphs” that appear here and there throughout our unbridled history. Instead, the accent was always on applying that legacy to navigate Georgia ahead—towards the future—and to do so by way of well‑calculated steps and decisions.

A historical review of Shevardnadze’s legacy—a profile of his lead­ership—is never a purely academic, disinterested endeavor. She­vardnadze has been different things to different people. For the Soviets, for instance, he was a Caucasian making it through the ranks of the party nomenklatura, punching a bit above his weight to strengthen his grip on his personal power, like Georgians (and not only them) often did in those times.

Shevardnadze rose to be the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia and was, as observers admit, a more ca­pable economic steward and a more liberal autocrat (as far as Soviet repub­lic‑level secretaries went) than those who preceded or succeeded him. For example, he served as a skillful interlocutor between the Soviet leadership and Georgian protesters in 1978, who demanded that Georgian remain the sole language within Georgia, with Shevardnadze succeeding to outma­neuver and persuade the Kremlin leadership.

Then, in 1985, he rose to become the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, resigning abruptly in December 1990 before briefly taking the post up again in late 1991. A few months later, in March 1992, he returned to the fountain of his local power to build a new narrative as a national leader—a co‑author of Georgia’s rediscovered independence.

Shevardnadze left Moscow for Georgia to lead a country that was very much taking toddler’s steps in a new world. I remember how, at the time— at the beginning—most of us walked around pretending that we knew what we were doing; and I also remember there were a few who actually had the conviction that they did, in fact, actually know what they were doing. Obviously, Shevardnadze fell into the latter category: he had the audacity, the courage, the experience, and perhaps the cheek to act as if he was actu­ally competent. Georgia needed such confidence and, frankly, all of us who worked around him needed it too.

I first met Shevardnadze on April 1st, 1992. On that very day he asked me whether I was willing to move from the position of First Deputy Foreign Minister to become his foreign policy adviser.

I guess the expression on my face betrayed how stunned I felt at the pro­posal, that had (to my mind, at least) come out of nowhere. “I hope you didn’t take my offer as an April fool’s joke,” he said. I never looked back.

Shevardnadze chose his new team—myself included—not because we were similar but because we were not. He knew the world was changing, he was too confident to be afraid, and he filled his cabinet with people who would help him learn, accommodate, and shape the future for the benefit of Georgia.

I will never forget Shevardnadze’s first “instruction”—a pronouncement, really—that he shot out spontaneously to us right at the start: “Don’t worry, we’ll work together, for we have a big strategic agenda. Yes, it will not be an easy time—too many challenges, too many risks. So, I will need fresh ideas and concepts to navigate Georgia safely from its disastrous situation! Therefore, try to find young and knowledgeable people, engage them into different brainstorming sessions, and introduce them to me.”

I call to mind one other “instruction” that Shevardnadze gave us soon thereafter: “Georgia will never be safe, stable, prosperous, and, in the end, sovereign and independent if, for example, Azerbaijan and Ukraine are not either. That’s why Georgia will need to take delicate care to nurture its relations, specifically with Azerbaijan,” he continued.: We need to do this in more than the usual nuanced way. We need to help and support each other, and we need to recognize that if Georgia succeeds, this will represent a triumph for Azerbaijan as well, and vice versa,” Shevardnadze concluded.

One way this “instruction” was carried over into our diplomatic work was in writing letters. Heads of state write untold letters to their fellow world leaders. Some administrations take this more seriously than others (the same can be said about composing speeches). For our part, we always made sure the letters that went out with President Shevardnadze’s signature were never pro forma. At his insistence, each letter went through multiple revi­sions until we were all satisfied it was ready to be sent out. Almost without fail—and in particular with respect to the letters we sent to U.S. presidents and leaders of other major Western powers—we included a well‑crafted paragraph or two about Azerbaijan and Ukraine, emphasizing the impor­tance of assisting those states and noting the latest Georgian initiatives in doing the same, but also what they were doing to help us.

The letter writing example helps to illustrate how Shevardnadze identi­fied and communicated Georgia’s strategic foreign policy agenda that has remained valid into the present—an agenda that from the moment he took over the reins of the country looked squarely to the future.

Shevardnadze was ambitious, and then some. I remember a joke that went around in the 1970s in Tbilisi: two men are dragging a statue of Shevardnadze up a steep hill. “Why do you bother?,” a passerby asked. “Just leave him down below, and he’ll climb up himself.”

But ambition is the stuff of which consequential people are made. Shev’s well‑developed ambition was not simply about engendering a personal drive to acquire and hold power. For him, personal success was never an end in itself. It was a means to an end. And that end—that goal—was always about the bet­terment of others. No one who ever worked for him failed to feel an enormous sense of responsibility. This feeling, which comes to inform everything you do and all the duties you perform, cannot take hold if the end is merely power.

As the foreign minister of a superpower, Shevardnadze made his mark by the execution of what came to be known in some circles as the “Sinatra Doctrine”—the art of doing things “His Way,” which meant leaving behind Andrei Gromyko’s “executive‑style” of foreign policymaking that he had developed over nearly three decades as the Soviet Union’s foreign min­ister. Shevardnadze stood by Mikhail Gorbachev as he disengaged from a bloody and costly war in Afghanistan, which paved the way towards the instauration of change in East‑Central Europe, then Germany, then the Soviet Union itself, and then, inevitably, his Georgian homeland.

He continuously went where no Soviet foreign minister had gone be­fore. And he made it look easy—charmingly so—even effortless. He had a crushing sense of humor and, even when travelling abroad, he somehow was able to create an atmosphere that made it seem as if he was the natural host of every conversation.

Invariably, Shev left in his wake more enemies than he made friends—especially in Moscow, and concretely among the military and intelligence communities. As it turned out, this was not forgotten.

For 30 years now, I have become accustomed to disagreeing with people over Babu’s true nature with people who confuse knowledge (or opinion) of what happened with the courage it took to make it happen.

No one can comment on Europe’s present, especially with regards to the inde­pendent states that emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, without referring to Shevardnadze.

But there is one point of consensus: no one can comment on Europe’s present—especially with regards to the independent states that emerged from behind the Iron Curtain—without referring to Shevardnadze.

Another preliminary point: by virtue of having been a Soviet statesman, Shevardnadze became a global leader. And this carried over to his time as President of Georgia. And no one has come close since. Shevardnadze is literally the last Georgian who was endowed with the capacity for global outreach, possessed a global network, and who was capable of expending cultural and political capital on behalf of his small country on a global scale.

As Foreign Minister of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Shevardnadze played a pivotal role in the reunification of Germany and, therefore, of Europe. In part due to the fact that Vladimir Putin keeps evoking the “Great Patriotic War” in his nationalist rhetoric, the West has become desensitized to the 27 million people who were lost in the war with Nazi Germany. But in 1985, when Shevardnadze rose to head the Soviet Foreign Ministry, he was a minister of a people that still had vivid mem­ories of that war. Indeed, the memory of the Second World War was fun­damental to why citizens of the Soviet Union referred to themselves as “a people,” if they did at all. To get the Soviet people to accept German re­unification was difficult enough, given this fact. But it should be recalled that Shevardnadze did much more than make this historic concession. He went much further: he championed it. I remember in 1993 he visited Germany as the Head of State of Georgia, and during a fully packed gala reception in Berlin he exclaimed: “What a life! One Georgian dismem­bered Germany and another one has unified it. It sure looks like nothing in this world happens without the meddling of Georgians!”

I think the reason why his West German counterpart, Hans‑Dietrich Genscher, referred to Shevardnadze as “one of the significant and out­standing statesmen of the twentieth century” was that he actually made a positive case for a united Germany. After all, it was not the Soviet Union but Great Britain that most fiercely resisted its former enemy’s reunification, with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher—known to supporters and detractors alike as the Iron Lady—going so far as to visit Moscow to try to convince Gorbachev and Shevardnadze to reverse their position. This was a classic “balance‑of‑power” move that was more reminiscent of Lon­don’s thinking when it had been hard at work in building a coalition against Napoleon than the actions expected of a Euro‑Atlantic partner and ally in the waning years of the Cold War.

That is not to compare the qualities of Shevardnadze with those of Margaret Thatcher. The kneejerk reaction of that quintessentially Conservative politician was in line with her nation’s traditions. For the British, the Americans were, systemically, the perfect missing piece in an elaborate game of alliances that had remained imbalanced for decades, perhaps for centuries. After all, who can forget the classic formulation of Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, that the Alliance was all about keeping “America in, Russia out, and Germany down.” The reuni­fication of Germany meant it was no longer down and that the Russians were not quite out. At least Thatcher and Shevardnadze agreed—in the context of negotiating the terms of the post‑Cold War settlement—that the complex question of German reunification was not of “red line” im­portance so long as the Americans stayed in, for this meant that even a unified Germany could be held in check (if not held down), and, it was assumed (or hoped), Russia could be brought into the fold, perhaps even assimilated (instead of being kept out in the cold).

Now, of course, we can play the “who was right” game in which historians like to dabble. Much depends on the passage of time and one’s perspective. What appeared right in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War can be reviewed and reassessed three decades later. But one should always keep in mind that the benefit of hindsight is the prerogative of the scholar rather than the diplomat; for the diplomat, “being right” in the long term is less of a concern. The point for the diplomat is to play a role in driving his side’s foreign policy narrative: “there was no other logic,” Shevardnadze went on to write in his memoirs, with regards to the question of reunification.

To come back to the Iron Lady for a moment more. Thatcher and Shevardnadze had very different roles to play and operated in the context two different narratives. The Silver Fox stood by Gorbachev as he was trying to disengage the Soviet Union from the captive half of Europe in order to pave the way towards a new and hopefully united Europe. That would have been a Europe with no victors and no vanquished—a Europe in which the Soviet Union would become an integral part of a new order rather than a defeated adversary.

More than almost any other factor, it was the August 1991 attempted coup in Moscow that set in motion events that put an end to that vision.

Shevardnadze understood that making friends in the West (and with the West) was Realpolitik. Thatcher saw things differently. She viewed herself as the latest in a string of British leaders who stood on the right side of history, claiming her rightful seat at the table around which the future of Europe was to be discussed and decided.

She understood this claim as the third great vindication of Britain and British grand strategy in less than a century—of course, not Britain alone, but Britain acting in concert with the same small, core group of allies. And to her credit, she did seem to have based her position not just on a halcyon glance back at history but also on a look towards the future—to twenty or thirty years hence and the systemic challenge that could be posed by a resurgent and powerful Germany standing tall at the center of a new European state system.

Sure, the idea of a United States of Europe encompassing Germany and Great Britain was the takeaway line from a famous speech Thatcher’s hero Winston Churchill had delivered in Zurich in 1946; but that speech is one of the few spoken by the great Englishman that was quoted far more on the Continent than in Albion. And as we know today, the idea never quite res­onated with Lady Thatcher. But for Shevardnadze, the modern‑day version of Churchill’s vision made strategic sense.

Shevardnadze bought into Gorbachev’s idea that it was possible to dissolve an em­pire of unequals and join a common project as an equal.

Shevardnadze bought into Gorbachev’s idea that it was possible to dissolve an empire of unequals and join a common project as an equal. Shevardnadze was willing to entertain a rather romantic vi­sion (a German vision, one could even say) of a Europe ruled on the basis of values and principles rather than naked power. In such a Europe, “blood and iron” would take a back seat and the Soviet Union would not be de­feated and dissected but rather re‑conceptualized and re‑integrated in what Gorbachev called a “common European home.”

That is why the question of “who was right—Thatcher or Shev?” is imma­terial. Without the benefit of an oracle, the best a leader can do is act with clarity, conviction, openness of heart, and strength of mind. In the world Shevardnadze imagined, it was possible for country like Georgia to exist with Russia but not in Russia. That dream defined Shevardnadze’s successor generation, my own.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Shevardnadze was reborn. But this re‑birth was of his own choosing. He chose not to remain in Moscow, but rather to become the president of a war‑torn, dilapidated, and dismembered country. And this choice, as I’ve already mentioned, had its consequences: some of Shevardnadze’s foreign policy successes as the Soviet foreign minister ricocheted back to him when he returned home: the old Soviet military and security apparatus—having made a seamless turn to serve a “democratic Russia”—retaliated against the Silver Fox without hesitation: their choice was to carve out the Tskinvali region and Abkhazia, two historical Georgian territories. It should be noted that this carving rep­resented the first Moscow‑backed military operation in a former Soviet re­public after the collapse of the USSR.

Many still remember the moment when Shevardnadze—who had spent two weeks in Abkhazia’s capital, Sukhumi, which had been shelled and encircled by separatists forces and units of the Russian army—exclaimed that he wished to die rather than witness the surrender of Georgian lands to the adversary.

And so Shevardnadze began to reach out to Western capitals—to his per­sonal friends with whom he had worked hand‑in‑hand in the attempt to build a new world. I remember how he traveled to Germany to remind the leadership of very recent facts and even more momentous decisions that could have gone the other way. And I remember how deftly, seamlessly, he segued to asking for concrete support, which included a request for the provision of immediate material assistance.

I attended that meeting in Bonn with a stunned Helmut Kohl. Was this gambit of Shevardnadze’s a bit inflexible? Perhaps it was. But Tbilisi was not Moscow, and Georgia was falling apart: breadlines stretching for a ki­lometer or more, electricity cuts, no running water, looting, and civil war. Having chosen to run a bottomless ship in a stormy sea—to trade in his role of global leader for that of national leader in a country that was struggling to become a state in more than name alone—Shevardnadze was going to give it his all. He was ruthless in meeting the requirements of his role, every role. And he would do what it took. Survival is a dirty business. Kohl yielded. Germany delivered. And Georgia lived on to fight another day.

Shevardnadze’s evocation of the past was in truth a comment on the present. He had brought with him from Moscow three very important resources. First, a Soviet dowry in the form of Western contacts: the cultural and political capital of the man who helped reunify Germany and prevented bloodshed in East‑Central Europe. Second, the moral authority of the So­viet Union’s last foreign minister—the one who allowed the Berlin Wall to come crumbling down without falling on the head of a single European, especially those who came from the former Warsaw Pact countries. And third, his little black book of jottings and his little black box of favors—the sorts of things one invariably gains as the foreign minister of a superpower.

Shevardnadze was determined to carve out a role for a small state on the periphery of Europe—a state that most people in the West could not locate on a map.

Georgia could easily have become one of those coun­tries that was small and poor and irrelevant enough to be stepped on by its giant neighbor with impunity and without commanding even an hour’s worth of prime‑time television in the United States. That it did not was almost entirely Shev’s doing.

Georgia could easily have become one of those countries that was small and poor and irrelevant enough to be stepped on by its giant neighbor with impunity and without commanding even an hour’s worth of prime‑time television in the United States. That it did not was almost entirely Shev’s doing. He could command attention, he could demand and receive an audience. He could speak persuasively and firmly enough to make heads turn. Sure, he used his “Soviet stool,” but it was one that had been built of hard Georgian oak, and it was one on which he stood tall—seen and heard by all. His critics in Georgia would throw all that back into his face, as if his Soviet past was a liability.

But that was balderdash. In my ambassadorial capacity, I was ever‑grateful for his charisma, sure, but no less for his Rolodex and the favors he could call in at a moment’s notice. This was due to his Soviet past. So fine, it was Soviet. But it was past. And that Soviet past was put to new uses to help build a Georgian future. Period.

Of the many meetings with foreign leaders and conversations Shevard­nadze had over the course of our years working together, three rise to the mind as useful to convey in this essay. I recall, first, an episode punctured by gunfire.

The first senior American official who visited Shevardnadze in his office soon after he returned to Georgia in March 1992 was Richard Armitage, who had been sent by President George H.W. Bush to arrange the delivery of tons of grain to feed a famished nation. Shevardnadze thanked Armitage and promised that this was an investment and that, one day, the American taxpayer would be reimbursed. At that very moment, a shooting volley from the nearby street disturbed the conversation. “Mr. President,” Armitage noted with a semi‑sarcastic smile on his face, “It appears that you have more friends in Washington than here, in Tbilisi.” However, that was not quite true: even those shooting towards Shevardnadze would not have known what to do in a world without him.

I still remember distinctly another part of that conversation with Armitage—a conversation that turned into a friendly disquisition on Georgia’s geopolitical situation that still remains fully valid to this very day.

“I would like you to deliver this message back to my friends in Wash­ington,” Shevardnadze said—again, this was back in 1992. “We’ll do our best to make Georgia a functioning and resilient democracy in this part of the world. I know it won’t be easy, just the opposite in fact: it will be an uphill and tumultuous journey, and there will be mistakes and zig­zags. But Georgia will plough through all its difficulties, and we’ll be­come a normal, institutional, and functioning democracy one day. This we will do for ourselves, and we will also consider it our reimbursement to our American friends: a democratic and successful Georgia; an island of democracy in this part of the world,” Shev continued. “But,” he added, “Georgia will also become a regional actor and a facilitator, because Geor­gia’s security and stability will be strongly contingent on the stability and security of its immediate neighbors, first of all Azerbaijan and Ukraine,” he exclaimed.

And then, the Silver Fox came to his last point: “Always keep Russia on your mind. Even a ‘democratic Russia,’ which, as I understand, is currently one of America’s strategic priorities, and which will keep unbroken her imperial agenda, especially in her immediate neighborhood; and Russia will continue to attempt to keep our area weak and dependent on the Kremlin; to dominate and control that region, and thus promote their own interests.” How prophetic.

I come to the second conversation, which took place a little over a year after the first. Shevardnadze traveled to Kyiv for a state visit to Ukraine that was very successful. I remember an informal lunch hosted by President Leonid Kravchuk at which he and Shevardnadze had the opportunity to engage in casual conversation about various international issues as well as discuss their respective domestic challenges.

Babu calmly said, as if he were thinking aloud, “Naturally, we all need to have a peaceful and stable Russia as our neighbor, and we also need to take into account the interests of Russia in our part of the world; but only if Russia also would admit that Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Moldova, the Central Asian states—every former Soviet republic—are now independent and sover­eign. The problem is that the Russians still confuse the notion of ‘interest’ with the meaning of ‘influence,’ and so they still want to control and dominate the neighborhood.”

“I know, dear Leonid Makarovich,” Shevardnadze continued, “that you are knotted up with Westerners and Russians over very complex and painful negotiations”—a reference to what eventually became the famous (or infa­mous) Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances on Ukraine, signed on the margins of the OSCE Summit in December 1994. “And I know that these are very rough and hand‑wriggling negotiations. And I know how much pressure the Westerners are putting on you. I have seen, as a member of Politburo, thousands of memoranda and reports regarding nasty plans that detail how and by what means the Kremlin prearranged to keep control over the republics, including by provoking direct conflicts among different ethnic entities on the territory of the USSR. We must remember,” he added, “that great powers— especially imperial ones—appreciate strength as an instrument of deterrence. I know that from my own experience at the Soviet Foreign Ministry,” he continued.

“So I have been thinking: what if Ukraine is able keep just one nuclear missile in its military arsenal—naturally, just for deterrence! I understand that it’s no more than wishful thinking, but were it possible, it would strengthen Ukraine’s capacity to defend its independence and sovereignty. A strong and capable Ukraine is so vital for Georgia’s independence and sovereignty,” Shevardnadze concluded.

The third conversation involving Shevardnadze begins in Prague. During an April 1992 visit to that wonderful Central European city, I had the privilege of meeting Luboš Dobrovský, who at the time was serving as the Head of Václav Havel’s Presidential Administration. We were talking about the then new and now notorious Russian concept of the “near abroad.”

Dobrovský calmly admitted to me, “Tedo, if the West had not immediately countered and discouraged Russia on what nowadays they call their ‘near abroad’ concept, tomorrow we would have become the ‘middle abroad,’ and, eventually, we might have become the ‘faraway abroad.’ I do not mean to declare a war on Russia but rather to stay steadfastly with her, protecting our own independence and sovereignty,” added Dobrovský.

I remember how upon my arrival back to Tbilisi, I had related the ex­change to Shevardnadze. He smiled back at me in that particular way of his and said, “it’s easy to equivocate with these kinds of metaphors when you sit in Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, or Paris. Bring your friend Dobrovský just for one day either to Tbilisi or Baku, and sub­stitute Havel’s problems for just one day with mine or Aliyev’s. Your friend would forget his allegories instantly. Russia’s policy toward Georgia has been the same since the days of Ivan the Terrible, when Russia started assembling its empire. Peter the Great, Stalin, Yeltsin—in their essence, they’ve all pursue the same policy towards us: create chaos and weaken us to the point that their troops are called in on some pre­text or another to ‘keep the peace.’”

I then reminded Shevardnadze of Paul Goble’s famous crack regarding Russia’s “peacekeeping” capacity—a play on words that works perfectly in English: “piece‑keeping,” Goble called it: by which he meant keeping or grabbing one or another piece of land here and there. Shevard­nadze laughed passionately. “Indeed, Russian habits die hard,” he remarked.

In recalling these and many other conversations, it struck me that it was not so much what Shevardnadze did that made him irreplaceable. It was his ability to be completely realistic and down to earth, and yet, at the same time, to believe in and articulate a future that had no material foundation.

Shevardnadze had the real­ism to be utopian. He had a Hegelian (or Marxist) convic­tion in the inescapability of a better future that impressed Americans and inspired enough Georgians to keep us going when times were really tough. We needed to believe in order to get on with it. And we needed the Americans and Europeans to believe in us and to give us a hand. And we would have gotten neither without the Silver Fox lead­ing us on, sometimes by the sheer force of his spirit.

Shevardnadze had the realism to be utopian. He had a Hegelian (or Marxist) conviction in the inescapability of a better future that impressed Americans and inspired enough Georgians to keep us going when times were really tough. We needed to believe in order to get on with it. And we needed the Americans and Europeans to believe in us and to give us a hand. And we would have gotten neither without the Silver Fox leading us on, sometimes by the sheer force of his spirit.

It seemed to me at the time that Europe and America had more of a post‑Soviet mindset than Shevardnadze ever did. When the Dem­ocrats won the White House in November 1992, Eduard Shevardnadze dispatched me and my colleague (and good friend) Gela Charkviani to Washington to meet the new foreign policy team of the incoming Clinton Administration.

At the State Department we met with a transitional interagency foreign policy and security group, and later that day we met with Strobe Talbott, who had been nominated but not yet confirmed as Ambassador‑at‑Large for the Newly Independent States. We met Strobe in the cafeteria, located somewhere on the ground floor of the State Department, if memory serves. Strobe greeted us, his hands full of unpacked boxes and files.

Strobe and I were old friends, having met when he was a journalist and I was an analyst at the USA and Canada Studies Institute in Moscow. So the unsettled and informal nature of the meeting suited us fine, and it also allowed for an agenda that was broader than usual—more “reflective,” in a sense. The three of us talked about the “Newly Independent States” or NIS—the term used in the West for all the post‑Soviet republics before we grouped together to became the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS. One acronym replaced another, but the reality stayed the same.

Naturally, the discussion gravitated towards Russia and its “democratic perspectives.” Of course, we had no idea that the incoming Clinton Admin­istration had been quietly developing a new paradigm towards our part of the world that later came to known as the “Russia First” policy. I remember suggesting to Strobe that rather than focusing on Russian democratization, it would be better to help the NIS countries establish themselves as demo­cratic regimes in their own right. “Why not focus on creating a ‘democratic belt’ around Russia?,” I asked. “That would make it easier to build democracy in Russia,” I suggested.

That’s when Strobe muttered into his coffee that “they wouldn’t like the idea of a ‘belt’ around them.”

Indeed, anything resembling the idea of encirclement seemed quite be­yond the spirit of the day, week, month, year, and even century—from the Russian perspective (from ours, too, I might add). For a country that stretches from Europe to the Far East, Russia’s intolerance of interference in its “near abroad” is problematic. Half the world’s landmass is near Russia, lest we forget. Another other issue is that Russia favors exclusive relation­ships. That was quite clear to a Georgian, a Lithuanian, or an Estonian in the early 1990s—or, come to think of it, in the early 1890s, or even the early 1790s. But in the West, the dominant idea at the time was that it was pos­sible to build on a clean slate—think back to how even serious people took seriously the “end of history” hypothesis and the “unipolar era” paradigm— and that Europe would no longer works on the “blood and iron” principle.

But that’s not what happened. certainly not in our world. We knew we were racing against the clock, and that the objectives of building a country and finding a role for ourselves in the world were intrinsically linked. While Shevardnadze has been accused by some at home of being too much of a “post‑Soviet” leader, he was the first to realize that if Georgia was to build a state that was substantively independent, we would have to build a narrative of relevance from the ground up.

We wanted in on the redesign of the European energy map; we wanted in on the redefinition of trade routes. And we wanted in with regards to joining the EU and NATO. Georgia had to make the case for its instrumentality. Of course, Shevardnadze understood that Georgia’s journey to NATO would take a long time. But he did not want us to stand forever under the arch that held NATO’s “open door.” It reminded him too much of re­volving doors: you’re kind of in and then you’re instantly out. When he read that NATO Secretary General Javier Solana had once again delivered his almost ritualistic pronouncements on the Atlantic Alliance’s Open‑Door policy, Shevardnadze cracked in his usual way: “If one stays too long in an open door, one might catch a nasty cold and die from exposure.”

Europe today is quite a differ­ent place from what we imag­ined it would become: Russia is not quite out, the Americans are not quite in, and the Ger­mans are not quite down. But Georgia is now more like the country Shevardnadze imag­ined than the country he ruled.

Europe today is quite a different place from what we imagined it would become: Russia is not quite out, the Americans are not quite in, and the Germans are not quite down. But Georgia is now more like the country Shevardnadze imagined than the country he ruled.

Shevardnadze was ruthless enough to remain relevant and amiable enough to make a difference. People like Shevardnadze do not work on the assumption of clarity. They create the clarity we take for granted. From Babu and Thatcher, to Genscher and Baker, we judge leaders as if they act out a script. But the truth is that they don’t: they improvise. If we notice they’re improvising, then they’re doing something really wrong; if we don’t, then they don’t get the credit. Yet Shevardnadze managed to get enough credit to hold onto power when the stakes were really high and use it to make a difference.

As a senior non‑Russian member of the Soviet nomenklatura, Shevard­nadze competed with Heydar Aliyev, the founding father of mod­ern‑day Azerbaijan, for decades during the last decades of the Soviet Union. But in paving the way for their respective countries to emerge from the Cold War into the brave new world of independence and sovereignty—liberating their nations from the shackles of the USSR—the two leaders stretched their hands out to one another other, got their nations to do the same, and in the process dragged Berlin, Brussels, and Washington into the region, pretty much for the first time in history.

Shevardnadze competed with Heydar Aliyev for de­cades during the last decades of the Soviet Union. But in paving the way for their countries to emerge from the Cold War into the brave new world of independence and sovereignty, the two leaders stretched their hands out to one another other, got their nations to do the same, and in the process dragged Berlin, Brussels, and Washington into the region, pretty much for the first time in history.

Under Shevardnadze’s steward­ship, Georgia worked with Turkey and Azerbaijan to implement the Baku‑Tbilisi Ceyhan oil pipeline and its natural gas equiv­alent, the Baku‑Tbilisi‑Erzurum pipeline.

I clearly remember those long and tu­multuous negotiations, the Kremlin’s fierce reaction, and the direct, brutal, and phys­ical danger to which Shevardnadze and Aliyev were constantly subjected, including assassination attempts on their lives. Despite all the brutalities and the immense political pressure they felt, Shevardnadze and Aliyev, to­gether with Turkey’s Süleyman Demirel, succeeded in realizing those truly strategic projects. “Shevardnadze and Aliyev are unique leaders who place their own national interests over realizing the interests of the entire region,” admitted Richard Morningstar, the Special Envoy of the U.S. Secretary of State for Eurasian Energy. Georgia and Azerbaijan also started building the Transportation Corridor Europe‑Caucasus‑Asia (TRACECA). And to­gether we articulated a narrative of strategic relevance that resonates to this date. That was how Georgia acquired choices it may not have otherwise had and came to build up its strategic posture.

At the 1999 OSCE Summit in Istanbul, Russia and Georgia released a joint statement that Russia would withdraw from its military bases in Georgia. This was right around the time a certain Vladimir Putin was coming into office. And I recall that the Clinton Administration was trying to manage the bruised ego of an economically stagnating Russia, and that some American policymakers and analysts made suggestions to Shevardnadze that now President Putin would object to Georgia’s Western trajectory.

For instance, I remember Shevardnadze’s meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the suite of rooms on the top floor of New York’s Waldorf‑Astoria Hotel that served, until a few years ago, as the Official Residence of the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Albright posed a question that was very typical of the sorts of in­quiries Shevardnadze was asked to address at the time: “Eduard, tell me, who’s Putin?”

Shevardnadze looked straight into her eyes and said, “Who’s Putin? I don’t know, dear Madeleine. I’ve never met him. But what I can tell you is that there are many ‘Putins’ in Russia; but Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan— all the former Soviet republics—should follow their own way.” His state­ment was not an exercise in senseless bravado. Shevardnadze saw Georgia as part of what he called “South‑Eastern Europe,” defining it as a region stretching from Vienna to the Urals, the Balkans to the Caspian. And he was determined to make history, not change it.

Shevardnadze never overperformed his roles. He did not pretend to be a world leader as he sat at the helm of a small country somewhere on a peripheral crossroads between East and West. He was a diehard realist and a doer, but he was also a politician who—as any politician, anywhere in the world—cared about state power but also about his personal standing as well as his ability to exercise power.

On the other hand, it was Shevardnadze who propelled a younger gener­ation of Georgian politicians into the political arena, those same who—due to certain objective reasons and factors—stirred up the 2003 Revolution of the Roses against corruption and rigged elections. Reflecting back on the events that led to his resignation, Shevardnadze later said, “I was promoting the new generation [...]. They were my pupils. This generational change could have happened in a much more violent way—with bloodshed—but I would not let this happen! The transfer of the power [...] did not impede the trajectory of development and the democracy‑building process.”

Shevardnadze was a little bit of everything: a Communist, an Atlanticist, a Soviet, a European, an international­ist; maybe a little bit of a fox, but never a chicken. He was all Georgian, and always a patriot.

The transformation of Georgia launched by Shevardnadze has never been a linear process—there were mistakes, blunders, drawbacks, and zigzags. But Georgia has never deviated from that way set by Shevardnadze. The country has kept on moving steadily onward, firmly and resolutely.

In literally creating a new democratic Georgia—predicated on the belief that doing so was the best option for Georgia’s future—Shevardnadze had to teach himself, and the country, the ABCs of democracy. He sometimes simplified its vibrant context. At other times, he maneuvered or sought compromise within his diverse team com­posed of “old‑timers” and reformers, while at the same time trying not to lose his per­sonal grip on power. But at the end of the day, he never wavered from navigating Georgia forward. And that remains She­vardnadze’s main national accomplish­ment—his legacy for future generations. Perhaps that is why American journalist Susan Glasser—while acknowledging the contributions of Mihkeil Saakashvili, Zurab Zhvania, and Nino Burjanadze during the Revolution of the Roses— admitted that the hidden hero of the Revolution was Eduard Shevardnadze, who rejected the use of force and chose to transfer his power peacefully. People with a tenth of his achievements have done the same since.

I can end with this: Shevardnadze never rested until there was no doubt who was the main protagonist in the room. If he could not be the center of attention, he did not play; and one needs to admit that he was a brilliant po­litical actor. He was a little bit of everything: a Communist, an Atlanticist, a Soviet, a European, an internationalist; maybe a little bit of a fox, but never a chicken. He was all Georgian, and always a patriot. Whatever he did, he did it “his way” or no way at all.