Shevardnadze
By late 1991, Georgia was engulfed in a terrible civil war, spurred on by the power-hungry Georgian leader Gamsakhurdia, who has since been compared to Macbeth. Driven by his own personal demons, holed up in his castle, surrounded by bodyguards and vicious dogs, driven mad by his own dreams of power. Georgia was destroyed by the civil war. The cities were ruined, the roads were ruined, internal travel became impossible. The economy (what existed of it) was also destroyed.
A military council ousted Gamsakhurdia in early 1992. He fled to Chechnya. The civil war continued. Gamsakhurdia still had troops of crazed supporters, more like followers of some personality cult than an actual army, and these troops were still battling it out with the new military council, and all of the rival mafias which had suddenly exploded throughout the country.
Eduard Shevardnadze was the Communist Party boss in Georgia, as well as the ex-secret police chief. He was also Gorbachev’s foreign minister. The two of them would take private strolls, and talk about Communism, and Leninism, and how to make it work, and what else could be done to bring about the glorious Communist society. They were both committed Communists. However, in 1979, right before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Shevardnadze, in a moment of truth, blurted out to Gorbachev: “This entire country is rotten. We have got to see if we can salvage something out of this entire mess.” Gorbachev continued to believe, almost until the very end, that Communism could still work, and that the Soviet Union could manage to stay together. Even with a new economy, and more freedom. Of course, he was proved tremendously wrong, but that was the level of belief he had in the right-ness of Communism.
Shevardnadze headed up the Communist apparatus in Georgia for many years. He represented the strong-hand of Moscow. As Mr. Secret Police Chief, he also was in charge of one of the most feared and despised institutions in all of Communist Russia.
But…amazingly, once Gamsakhurdia, the dissident, the idealist, took the country by the hand and led them into civil war, Shevardnadze (one of the truly great unsung heroes of the break-down of the “evil empire”) was called back from Moscow to clean up the mess.
It is truly an extraordinary story, one which I can’t really describe in too much detail. But here is this man, this person who was once at the TOP of the Communist Party. He had all the perks of his position. And then, in a matter of 2 years, the entire edifice through which he has created his entire life, his entire philosophy, disappears off the face of the planet. Unbelievable. Many apparatchiks in the Communist Party could not handle the transition, and committed suicide. Others were completely lost when faced with the prospect of actually having to COMPETE in an open society for jobs, for raises, etc. Others leapt almost immediately into entrepreneurial pursuits, and others veered off into more criminal pursuits.
Shevardnadze kept his head. He let it go. He let that dream go, and immediately set about doing what needed to be done in Georgia. Now this is why this man is so extraordinary. So many of these ex-CP guys were called back to help run the countries who were now independent and floundering, and so many of them did so because they enjoyed the power so much. They kept all of the facets of the Communist Party intact (one-party systems, personality cults surrounding the leader, no free press, secret police), and just called it by another name.
Shevardnadze let go of Communism. Truly. And came back to Georgia, with the aim to rebuild the country, restore the economy, and get Georgia ready to join the modern world. He brought reformers into the government. He also kept many of the gangster-mafia types in high-level positions, so that they wouldn’t be able to form a strong opposition. He included them in the process. He was very canny, very smart. He also survived countless assassination attempts during all of this.
Shevardnadze has worked a mini-miracle in Georgia. It is quite a success story, albeit one in progress. There is still a huge mafia problem in the country. There is still a huge criminal element. But throughout the 1990s, the economy has been growing by double digits. One of the best signs of how well things are going is the ubiquitousness of traffic jams in every major city. This may sound incredibly annoying, but add this to the picture: In 1991, there were NO drive-able roads in the entire country. Cars couldn’t get anywhere. You could not leave your village, you could not get from here to there. Shevardnadze has created an infrastructure in the country which has raised the quality of life tremendously. Traffic jams!! How wonderful!
Shevardnadze is still the leader of Georgia today. Still battling off assassination attempts, still trying to rebuild the country, still putting down separatist movements all over the place, still trying to help foster a middle-class. A Communist man!! Committed to nurturing the bourgeoisie. I admire him very much.
Robert Kaplan, as always, has some very insightful things to say about Shevardnadze, in his book Eastward to Tartary. Check it out:
Shevardnadze, 71, was a burly man with white curly hair and, normally, a ruddy complexion. But now he was haggard and exhausted, and it was clear that helping to run the world as Soviet foreign minister had been a lot easier for him than running Grgia. His voice was deep and gruff, but he was patient, as though he were conducting a fireside chat with us — 20 local reporters and myself … One reporter asked the President why he was blaming the Russians [for the most recent assassination attempt] when the CIA was known to have ordered assassination attempts on Castro. This former Politburo member, used to limousines with the curtains drawn, symbolizing the power he had wielded in a vast tyrannical state, did not lose his temper at this. He smiled and enjoyed the exchange. In his own way, Shevardnadze had become a democrat … Shevardnadze had a simple strategy: personal physical survival. If he survived a few more years without dying or being killed — enough time, perhaps, for more political stabilization, more reforms, more institution-building — then his personal survival, or that of his successor, might no longer be synonymous with the survival of the state itself.
If you have spent any time at all learning about Communism, and how the whole thing went down once it ended, you will know how unbelievable this is. To let the power go, and know that in order for Georgia to survive, it had to survive whether he was the leader of the country or not. All we have to do is look at Iraq, or Libya, or Syria to to see the sickness of societies completely bound to the personality of one specific leader. The entire country (like Turkmenistan) becomes an expression of the leader’s ego. It’s sick. Shevardnadze could easily go that way, like many of his colleagues did. He did not. He is a man of character.
One more quote, and then I’ll finish up:
Eduard Amvrosiyevich Shevardnadze was one of three famous Georgians in 20th century world history. The other two were Stalin and Stalin’s feared secret police chief, Laventi Beria, a bespectacled man who combined the roles of Himmler and Eichmann in Stalin’s death machine. There are many similarities between Shevardnadze and these two great criminals. They too were manipulators, able to take advantage of any situation; they both betrayed their best friends as they rose to power. None of the three was truly educated, but all were talented: Each man had the strong intuition of a good hunting dog, who could sniff the essence of every idea an dsituation and adapt it to his needs …
For example, after one assassination attempt, everyone expected Shevardnadze to fire his interior minister. But he didn’t. What couldbe more useful than an interior minister who has been politically discredited, so that he cannot plot against you, because he is now dependent on your goodwill! Shevardnadze now runs the police directly through this man.
Morality is a funny thing. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it seemed that Gamsakhurdia — the intellectual who had translated Shakespeare — had been a moral man while Shevardnadze, the Communist hack, was an immoral one. But Shevardnadze, the Machiavellian hunting dog, had sniffed out the rot in the system he was a part of, and, along with his allies Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Yakovlev, tried to reform it for the sake of their own survivial. They failed and the Soviet Union collapsed. The peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union, perhaps the single most significant event of the 20th century, owes almost as much to Shevardnadze as to Gorbachev.
Meanwhile, Shevardnadze’s survival game continued in Georgia, where the lessons of The Prince were the surest path to democratization.
It’s certainly not a warm and fuzzy world and Shevardnadze is not a warm and fuzzy Jimmy Carter kind of guy.
But I believe he is a hero nonetheless.
