Trivia

President of the Republic of Georgia (1995-2003).

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR (2 July 1985-20 December 1990 and 19 November-26 December 1991).

Children: Manana, Director of the Georgian TV-Films Studio; Paata, Head of UNESCO mission.

Holds Honorary Doctorates from Harvard, Boston, Emory, Providence and Trieste Universities.

Survived two assassination attempts in the 1990s.

(23 November) Announced his resignation as President of Georgia, bowing to protesters who stormed parliament and declared a "velvet revolution." Shevardnadze was widely blamed for the grinding poverty in the violent and unstable former Soviet republic, and was accused by opponents of vote-rigging the 2 November parliamentary election. (November 2003)

Soviet Union Political Figure.

His father was a committed communist, a view that was not shared by his mother, who tried to persuade father and son to renounce their political activities. He joined the Communist Party's youth movement in 1946, rising rapidly through the ranks to become Georgian party boss in 1972.

Grandfather of "Russia Today" (RT) TV network presenter Sophie Shevardnadze.

CPSU official.

First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party (29 September 1972-6 July 1985).

He was demoted in 1961 by the Politburo of the Georgian Communist Party after offending a senior official.

Eduard Shevardnadze was a Soviet and Georgian politician and diplomat who governed Georgia for several non-consecutive periods from 1972 until his resignation in 2003 and also served as the final Soviet minister of foreign affairs from 1985 to 1990.I.

Shevardnadze was accorded a state funeral on 13 July 2014, which was attended by the Georgian political leaders and foreign dignitaries, including the former US Secretary of State James Baker and former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. After a service at the Holy Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi, Shevardnadze was buried next to his late wife Nanuli Shevardnadze at the Krtsanisi residence in Tbilisi.

Shevardnadze was appointed to the First Secretaryship of the Georgian Communist Party by the Soviet government; he was tasked with suppressing the grey and black-market capitalism that had grown under his predecessor Vasil Mzhavanadze's rule.

At the 25th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1976, Shevardnadze gave a speech in which he called general secretary Leonid Brezhnev "vozhd" (leader), a term previously reserved for Joseph Stalin. His adulation was only surpassed by that of Andrei Kirilenko and Heydar Aliyev. As Yegor Ligachev later said, Shevardnadze never contradicted a general secretary.

In 1991, Shevardnadze was baptized into the Georgian Orthodox Church.

Shevardnadze was a close ally of Gorbachev and was a strong advocate of the reform policies of glasnost and perestroika. He subsequently played a key role in the détente that marked the end of the Cold War. He negotiated nuclear arms treaties with the United States.

Under Shevardnadze's rule, Georgia was one of several Soviet Republics that did not experience economic stagnation, instead experiencing rapid economic growth. By 1974, industrial output had increased by 9.6 per cent and agricultural output had increased by 18 per cent. The shortage economy, which had evolved into a prevalent problem in other parts of the Soviet Union, had nearly disappeared in Georgia. Long food queues in Tbilisi had shortened while those in Moscow had lengthened. Some of Shevardnadze's economic policies were adopted nationally by the Soviet government.

In 1948 at the age of twenty, Shevardnadze joined the Georgian Communist Party (GCP) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He rose steadily through the ranks of the Georgian Komsomol and after serving a term as Second Secretary, he became its First Secretary.