Eduard Shevardnadze, who has died aged 86, deserves to go down in history as one of the major figures of our age for steering the Soviet Union in from the cold during his five and a half years as Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister, from 1985 onwards. After the end of the Soviet Union, he became the leader of his native Georgia, now an independent country, and took a brave stand. In the autumn of 1993, he stood in the middle of a brutal battle in Sukhumi in an effort to defend Georgia's sovereignty against Abkhazian separatists. However, his good name was later tarnished amid allegations of corruption involving him and his family.
As Soviet foreign minister he had established a close working partnership with the US and its western allies, and gave meaning and substance to perestroika, the principle of restructuring. He probably understood far earlier than Gorbachev that perestroika, once unleashed, could not be used merely to dabble with reform of the communist system. He grasped that perestroika was the engine of fundamental change at home and abroad. When the time came, he was able to shed the communist credo and to embrace the prospect of democracy. And in 1990, when Shevardnadze realised that Gorbachev was too conservative to make the intellectual leap away from communism, he jumped ship, gave up his beloved foreign ministry and eventually left the party.
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