Staunton, July 8 – The death of
Eduard Shevardnadze yesterday has sparked an outpouring of memoirs and praise
about his contributions to ending the cold war and to helping Georgia escape
from the chaos of the 1990s. But in many ways, his most important contributions
in the transition from the Soviet world to the post-Soviet have come with his
three “departures.”
His first departure, if one may call
it that, came when he resigned as Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign minister at the
end of 1990, warning that a dictatorship was coming, that he would not be
complicit with that outcome, and that he would continue to struggle against it
as a public figure.
Shevardnadze was certainly prescient
about the former: Gorbachev was turning in a more authoritarian direction as it
became obvious to the Kremlin leader that the Soviet Union was dissolving
underneath him. By resigning, Shevardnadze called attention to something many
in Moscow and the West did not want to acknowledge.
But even more, he showed the way to
other officials that they could resign and fight what the Kremlin was doing
from the outside, an action that made it easier for others to take this step.
That accelerated the demise of the USSR, but it also had the not unimportant
effect of making the transition less violent than otherwise.
Shevardnadze’s second “departure”
came in November 2003 when after what had been a disastrous period in Georgian
life, he resigned as president rather than maintained himself in office by the
use of force. By doing so, he opened the way for the achievement of the Rose
Revolution and Tbilisi’s increasingly pro-Western orientation at home and
abroad.
Because his regime had become both
corrupt and ineffective, Shevardnadze is often not given credit for what in the
post-Soviet world was a quite remarkable decision, a willingness to bow to the
will of the people rather than keep himself in power at the price of their
blood as dictators in many of these countries have done.
Not only did that show the kind of
quiet courage that is all too lacking in Moscow and other post-Soviet capitals,
but it put Georgia on track both for the institutionalization of the Rose
Revolution but also and what is much more important the peaceful transition of
presidents and prime ministers that have followed. Shevardnadze deserves much
of the credit for that as well.
And Shevardnadze’s third “departure”
is, of course, his death. His passing not
only represents the transition across the region from those who were close to
the pinnacle of Soviet power to those who are ever-less affected by the Soviet
experience, who speak their national languages or English rather than Russian
and look in a variety of directions other than Moscow.
Both in the Russian Federation and
elsewhere, there are still a few members of the very top Soviet leadership in
power, and there are more who took their cues from that generation even as they
have moved away from it. Moreover, there are some people who were in more
junior positions at the end of Soviet times who want to be “more Orthodox than
the Patriarch.”
But the old nomenklatura in which
Shevardnadze began his career in Tbilisi and then advanced to Moscow before returning
to Georgia is dead or rapidly dying off.
And efforts to revive it or something like it are doomed to be both a
tragedy and a farce. Its passing was as inevitable as the passing of time, but
Shevardnadze made it much better than it might have been.
On the occasion
of his death at the age of 86, that is something he would have taken great
pride in. It is what all of us should
remember him for as well.
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