Shevardnadze: Perestroika's Other Father

By Bruce W. Nelan

Shortly before he became head of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev ambled along a Black Sea beach with his old friend Eduard Shevardnadze, the party chief in Georgia, discussing what needed to be done. "We were walking and talking," Gorbachev recalled later. "We compared notes. He said that everything was rotten through."

Four months later Shevardnadze was named Foreign Minister and Gorbachev's partner in perestroika. The appointment struck the world's chanceries as odd -- the Georgian was a provincial politician with no experience in world affairs -- and as an indication that Gorbachev intended to be his own Foreign Minister. That assessment was wrong. In reality, the two planned together to tame the country's adventurist foreign policy and make it the servant of domestic needs.

With his economy on the brink of collapse, Gorbachev recruited Shevardnadze to help him end the cold war and slash military spending. They would build good relations with Western Europe and the U.S. so the U.S.S.R. could tap the technology and investment funds it so desperately needed.

During 4 1/2 years in office, Shevardnadze did all that and more. His legacy is a world in which the decades-old fear of nuclear war between the two superpowers has almost vanished and East-West hostility is moving toward cooperation.

When Shevardnadze arrived at the Stalin-gothic Foreign Ministry on Smolensky Square, he treated it as a candidate for cleanup. After 28 years under the proprietorship of dour-visaged Andrei Gromyko, the ministry badly needed perestroika and glasnost. Within a year Shevardnadze replaced nine of the 12 deputy ministers, instituted a daily press briefing, and created departments for disarmament and economic relations with the West.

He immediately proved how quick a study he was. Though he read his early speeches slowly, blinking at unfamiliar terminology, within a few months his mastery of the details was obvious.

European diplomats were delighted to find that grim Grom's avuncular-looking successor was pleasant, modest and easy to deal with, even on tough questions. Shevardnadze described himself as a pragmatist: "The Soviet Union is firmly in favor of a solid and honest dialogue," he said. "We are interested in results."

One of his toughest jobs was getting the U.S. to believe that he and Gorbachev meant what they said. A breakthrough occurred at a private dinner in May 1989 when Shevardnadze convinced his American counterpart, James Baker, that Moscow was determined to deal with the weaknesses of its socialist system and to build a peaceful international environment that would allow it to focus on its internal ailments.

Shevardnadze went public with his intentions in a remarkable mea culpa speech to the Supreme Soviet in October 1989. Reversing a policy of decades of Soviet intervention in Eastern Europe, he vowed that every country in the Warsaw Pact now had "absolute freedom of choice" in politics and government. Not only that, he continued, but by invading Afghanistan "we had set ourselves against all humanity, ignored universal human values." Finally, he said, Moscow planned "to curtail all our military bases as well as our military presence abroad by the year 2000."

Things moved very fast after that. If Gorbachev was the final policymaker, Shevardnadze was the executor of his wishes as Eastern Europe freed itself and lingering regional disputes were defused in southern Africa, Central America and Southeast Asia. Negotiations that had been stalled for years or decades , suddenly bore fruit: intermediate-range missiles had already been abolished in 1987, but a treaty mandating major reductions in conventional forces in Europe was signed last month; and the START pact cutting strategic nuclear forces is to be signed in February.

In a dramatic demonstration of U.S.-Soviet cooperation, Shevardnadze and Baker stood shoulder to shoulder last August in Moscow and declared that Iraq must pull out of Kuwait unconditionally. Shevardnadze was always the Kremlin's strongest advocate of closer relations with Washington, so his departure creates doubts about the role the U.S. will now play in Moscow's "new thinking" in foreign affairs. Gorbachev has issued assurances that Soviet foreign policy will not change, but without Shevardnadze it will have to -- if only in pace and vigor -- as a new minister learns the ropes.

Moreover, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze calculatedly made their country's foreign policy a function of domestic affairs. If Shevardnadze's chilling prediction of an approaching dictatorship comes to pass, it cannot fail to produce profound and ugly changes in the face the U.S.S.R. presents to the outside world.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington and John Kohan/Moscow