Eduard Ambrosiyevich Shevardnadze

Eduard Shevardnadze was born in 1928 in the village of Mamati in western Georgia, a teacher's son. Rising through the Komsomol, he became Georgia's interior minister in 1965 and mounted sweeping campaigns against the republic's entrenched shadow economy and corruption; in 1972 he became first secretary of the Georgian party. His purges, which cost thousands of officials their posts, made national news, but he could experiment too: ventures like the Abasha agricultural experiment, introducing material incentives, were later reread as previews of reform.

At the same time he spoke the language of loyalty to the centre to perfection; his tribute at the 1976 congress, that for Georgia the sun rises in the north, in Russia, became a classic of flattery. This southern strongman of discipline and experiment, loyalty and pragmatism, grew close to Gorbachev, party secretary of a neighbouring region, at the resorts, and the two came to share a conclusion: we cannot go on living like this.

In July 1985 Gorbachev astonished the world by making him, a man with no diplomatic experience, Gromyko's successor as foreign minister. Astonishment soon turned to reappraisal: unconfined by the grammar of career diplomats, the Georgian became the ablest executor of the New Thinking.

In July 1985 Gorbachev made Eduard Shevardnadze, first secretary of the Georgian party with no diplomatic experience whatever, foreign minister in succession to Gromyko. It was a startling appointment, but a calculated one: Gorbachev wanted a loyal ally untouched by the inertia of the old diplomacy. Shevardnadze had led Georgia since 1972, making his name with anti-corruption drives and experimental economic reforms.

For the next five years he was the working executor of New Thinking diplomacy. The INF Treaty of 1987, the Geneva accords of 1988 and the withdrawal from Afghanistan the following year, the acceptance of German unification and the CFE treaty in 1990: the Soviet Union's global retreat passed through his hands and became treaty text. When the Eastern European regimes fell one after another in 1989, it was he who articulated Moscow's policy of non-intervention.

Critics charge that he gave away too much, too fast, for too little in return; above all, the failure to fix NATO's eastward non-expansion in writing during German unification became a lasting controversy. On 20 December 1990 he resigned abruptly with the warning that dictatorship was coming. Eight months later the warning came true as a coup.

In the winter of 1990, as Gorbachev leaned towards the hardliners, Shevardnadze warned the comrade with whom he had spent five years ending the Cold War, in the most dramatic way available. On 20 December, from the rostrum of the Congress of People's Deputies, he departed from his text: dictatorship is coming; no one knows who the dictator will be or what the regime will be; I resign in protest. The hall froze, and Gorbachev did not hide his sense of betrayal.

Eight months later the August coup made the warning a prophecy: it was staged by the very men promoted that winter. In November 1991 he returned briefly as foreign minister of the crumbling union and kept watch over its final weeks.

Conservatives have named him the man who sold off Eastern Europe and Germany. He answered that laying down in order what could not be held by force was diplomacy's achievement. Whether managed retreat is defeat or wisdom, that argument condenses the two ways of seeing the Soviet end.

In March 1992 Shevardnadze returned to Georgia, where the first president, Gamsakhurdia, had been driven out by civil war, and became chairman of the State Council. The diplomatic face of the Soviet dissolution now stood amid the ruins that dissolution had left behind: a failing state where militias ruled the streets and Abkhazia and South Ossetia were breaking away.

Defeat in the Abkhazian war of 1993 drove hundreds of thousands of ethnic Georgians from their homes, and Shevardnadze had to accept membership of the CIS as the price of Russian support. Elected president in 1995, he survived assassination attempts in 1995 and 1998. Western aid and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline kept the state afloat, but the economy stagnated and corruption became the byword of his rule.

In November 2003, when demonstrators protesting a rigged parliamentary election entered the chamber carrying roses, he refused to order a bloody crackdown and resigned. It was the Rose Revolution. He spent his last years writing memoirs at his Tbilisi residence and died on 7 July 2014. The career of a man who had once steered a superpower's diplomacy, ending amid the chaos of his small homeland, was a miniature of the fates the Soviet collapse set loose.