Georgia ex-president Eduard Shevardnadze

A GROUND-BREAKING Soviet foreign minister and later the president of an independent Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, has died at the age of 86.

His spokeswoman, Marina Davitashvili, said he died after a long illness.

Mr Shevardnadze swept heroically across the international stage in the final years of the Soviet empire, helping topple the Berlin Wall and end the Cold War.

But as the leader of post-Soviet Georgia his career in the public eye ended in humiliation and he was chased out of his parliament and forced into retirement.

Mr Shevardnadze’s wife, Nanuli, died in 2004. The couple had a daughter and a son.

As Soviet foreign minister, he was the diplomatic face of Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalising policies of glasnost and perestroika.

Following the wooden Andrei Gromyko, Mr Shevardnadze impressed Western leaders with his charisma, quick wit and commitment to Gorbach ev ’s reform course.

He helped push through the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989, signed landmark arms control agreements and helped negotiate German reunification in 1990 — a development that Soviet leaders had long feared and staunchly opposed.

Western leaders, especially Germans, would remain grateful for Mr Shevardnadze’s work as foreign minister. But in the former Soviet Union those nostalgic for a return to superpower status lumped him with Mr Gorbachev in the ranks of the unpardonable.

Mr Shevardnadze resigned in December 1990.

He returned to Georgia and was elected president for a five-year term in 1995 after the country adopted a new constitution.