Nation

In his three months in office, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze has charmed the diplomatic world with his openness and self-effacing wit. His kindly eyes and unruly silver mane project an image that is radically different from that of his fastidious, poker-faced predecessor, Andrei Gromyko. But like his boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, Shevardnadze is a shrewd, tough-minded politician with steel beneath his smile. Some Sovietologists last summer assumed that Shevardnadze, with his minimal foreign policy experience, would serve simply as a stand-in while Gorbachev acted as his own chief diplomat. Yet Shevardnadze has shown a readiness to take charge of the Foreign Ministry with the assertiveness that has been a hallmark of his career.

Born 57 years ago in the southern Soviet republic of Georgia, Shevardnadze entered the Communist Party at the unusually young age of 20 and began a quick ascent of the local party apparatus. In 1965 he was named Georgian minister for maintenance of public order--head of the republic's police force. In this role he launched a crackdown on the freelance corruption that had plagued the region, although some in the Soviet Union say that he personally benefited from the well-organized kickback schemes, which remained intact. When he became Georgia's Communist Party first secretary in 1972, he was credited with revitalizing the region's economy and allowing a breath of fresh air for its cultural establishment.

Shevardnadze's zeal is well remembered by Soviet Physician Galina Nikolayevna Borodin, a San Francisco-based emigre who lived in the party secretary's household near Tbilisi between 1973 and 1977. Borodin recalls that in the '60s and early '70s, Georgia was so rife with corruption that the only way to gain entrance to the republic's prestigious Medical Institute was to bribe the rector. "Before Shevardnadze," Borodin says, "everything could be bought or sold." She adds, "He was very oppressive, but he oppressed people fairly." Shevardnadze's toughness earned him some enemies. Borodin recalls an assassination attempt in the early '70s that prompted the party secretary to employ bodyguards. Shevardnadze has been implicated in reports of torture in Georgia prisons. In documents published in the U.S. nine years ago by Georgian dissidents, he was linked to special "pressure cells," where inmates were assaulted by other prisoners with the blessing of the authorities.

In the 1960s Shevardnadze began promoting public-opinion research to gauge Georgians' views on social problems, and last spring he authorized newspaper polls of public reaction to the government's anticorruption campaign. As Georgia party leader, he won Gorbachev's admiration by implementing several economic reforms, including a regulation allowing families to own small businesses.

Borodin recalls Shevardnadze as an obsessive worker who often spent 14 hours a day at his office. A fitness enthusiast and jogger, Shevardnadze installed an exercise room and a sauna in his home and threatened to fire overweight officials unless they got into shape in a matter of weeks. Shevardnadze has said his hobbies are beekeeping and tending his private vineyard. He is well read in the Russian and Georgian classics and has even scribbled a bit of lyric poetry. Shevardnadze and his wife Nanuli, a journalist, have a daughter Manana, in her 30s, and a son Paata, in his late 20s, but as Nanuli once confided to Borodin, family life takes a backseat to her husband's work. "He's a true Leninist," she said of Eduard Shevardnadze, "a dedicated Communist."