Helped to end Cold War as Soviet foreign minister
Perestroika figure later led Georgia but was ousted
TBILISI, Georgia — Eduard Shevardnadze, who as Soviet foreign minister helped bring downthe Berlin Wall and end the Cold War, died Monday after a long illness.
Shevardnadze, who was 86, went on to lead his native Georgia in the stormy early years after independence before being ousted in street protests.
Shevardnadze’s assistant, Marina Davitashvili, confirmed the death. His funeral will take place Sunday and he will be buried next to his wife in the courtyard of his Tbilisi residence, she said.
Bloomberg News reported that he died at his residence.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who picked Shevardnadze as a break from the Soviet Union’s apparatchiks, expressed sorrow over the passing of a “friend.”
He described Shevardnadze, whose shock of white hair and wily diplomacy earned him the nick name “the Silver Fox,” as an “extraordinary, talented person” who had done much to broker Germany’s peaceful reunification and end the nuclear arms race.
“He was always quick to find a way of connecting with different people — with youngsters and the older generation,” Gorbachev said.
One of those connections was with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker— or “Jim,” as Shevardnadze called him. It was a friendship that would help shape the post-Cold War era.
“Shevardnadze will have an honored place in history because he and Mikhail Gorbachev refused to support the use of force to keep the Soviet empire together,” Baker, who was secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, said in a statement.
“He was an elegant and soft-spoken gentleman. … He was my friend with whom I had a special relationship,” Baker said.
In Moscow, Shevardnadze’s role in the Soviet Union’s demise won him many enemies and a checkered legacy.
“Of course he is a historic figure, but he belongs to that set of people who will go down in history as the destroyers of the Soviet Union, pandering to Western efforts to do so,” Ivan Melnikov, the deputy head of Russia’s Communist Party, said in a statement.
Russian President Vladimir Putin — who has described the Soviet disintegration as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century — remained neutral, offering his condolences to Shevardnadze’s “family, as well as the Georgian people.”
Loved by some but loathed by others in Georgia after bringing stability but failing to tackle widespread corruption, Shevardnadze rarely ventured out of his hilltop residence during his last years.
As Soviet foreign minister from 1985 to 1991, he oversawa thawin ties with the West andwas one of the intellectual fathers of perestroika, the reform policy that Gorbachev said was conceived during a stroll along the shores of the Black Sea with Shevardnadze.
In the post-Soviet landscape, Shevardnadze returned to Georgia to become president and brought some calm to the republic after a period of anarchy.
But he was toppled in the country’s 2003 Rose Revolution, led by Mikhail Saakashvili, and unceremoniously bundled out of Parliament by his minders when it was stormed by protesters.
“I see that all this cannot simply go on. If I was forced tomorrow to usemy authority, itwould lead to a lot of bloodshed,” he said when he stepped down in November 2003.
“I have never betrayed my country, and so it is better that the president resigns.”