Georgia

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1881–1959 ○ Natural causes · New York

Architect of Revolutionary Defencism and the man to whom Lenin replied, 'There is such a party!'

At the First Congress of Soviets on 4 June 1917, Tsereteli declared that 'there is no party in Russia that says: give us power.' Lenin rose from his seat and answered: 'There is such a party!'

A Georgian Menshevik leader who championed Revolutionary Defencism in 1917 and served as Interior Minister in the Provisional Government. He is remembered for drawing Lenin's famous retort, 'There is such a party!' After the October Revolution he helped found an independent Georgia.

Foreign affairs 1928–2014 ○ Natural causes

The foreign minister who ended the Cold War, then a president in a civil war

On 20 December 1990, Shevardnadze stood before the Congress of People's Deputies and declared: "A dictatorship is coming. I am resigning. Let this be my protest." Eight months later, the August coup made his warning real.

He met Gorbachev at a 1958 Komsomol congress and remained his closest ally for over thirty years. Named first secretary of Georgia in 1972, he waged a sweeping anti-corruption campaign (arresting 30,000) and piloted the experimental Abasha economic reforms. Handed the Foreign Ministry in 1985, he negotiated arms control, the Afghan withdrawal, and German unification in five years, then resigned in December 1990 warning that 'dictatorship is coming.' When the USSR collapsed he returned home to lead Georgia through civil war and assassination attempts for over a decade, stepping down peacefully in the 2003 Rose Revolution.

Socialist-bloc reform leader 1939–1993 ✕ Shot dead under disputed circumstances

The nationalist dissident who became Georgia's first democratically elected president

"All my life I was in the opposition and fought against the government. Now I am the government": said in an interview after becoming chairman of the newly elected Supreme Council, 1990.

Georgian philologist and dissident, son of the celebrated writer Konstantine Gamsakhurdia. In 1977 he co-founded the Georgian Helsinki Group with Merab Kostava, exposing Soviet human rights abuses to the world, and was repeatedly imprisoned. In April 1989, as co-leader of the Independence Committee, he organized mass peaceful demonstrations and hunger strikes in Tbilisi; the Soviet military's bloody crackdown on them decisively radicalized Georgian opinion toward independence. Leading the Round Table-Free Georgia coalition, he won the first multiparty elections in 1990 and was elected Georgia's first president in May 1991 with 87% of the vote, only to be overthrown in an armed coup seven months later, flee to Chechnya, and die under disputed circumstances in western Georgia in December 1993.