Eight Pieces of Empire (36 page)

Which all begs the obvious question: Why so much excitement in desecrating a reclining chair?

The answer is the following: In Georgian, the word
savardzeli
(literally, “chair” or “seat”) also means “power” in the political sense, and “Shevy” had held it for the better part of thirty years in one guise or another. Georgians loved to quip about his attachment to “power”
(
savardzeli
), the similar ring of the words
shevardeni
(the etymological root of his last name, which means “falcon”) and
savardzeli
adding an element of pun.

The final day was November 23, 2003. Ironically enough, this was the day when the nation celebrated Saint George’s slaying of the dragon.

THE WRITING HAD
been on the wall for several years. Aside from growing anarchy, reports were rife of members of Shevardnadze’s inner circle or some relatives manipulating a growingly distant leader to enrich themselves. At one government meeting, he was reportedly forced to acknowledge this fact but slammed his fist on a table, emphasizing that in the world of close-knit Georgian families, one simply could not put one’s close relatives in prison.

As the crisis deepened between demonstrators demanding that the-Man-Who-Ended-the-Cold-War quit, a nasty confrontation looked inevitable. Shevardnadze, after all, had been in positions of high power for most of the last thirty years. He wasn’t going to give up power that easily, was he?

OVER HIS THIRTY-YEAR
reign, Georgia’s opinions of Shevy had swung back and forth wildly, almost schizophrenically. As Georgia’s law-and-order-oriented interior minister from 1968 to 1972, he had been applauded by some for starting to rein in the republic’s legendary levels of corruption, but was despised and widely feared by others, who resented their toes being stepped on, or as being the source of the corruption he was allegedly reining in. As its Communist leader from 1972 onward, he was generally seen as a Machiavellian schemer by average Georgians (who were always among the most anti-Communists in the entire USSR), but one who managed to obtain unthinkable concessions from Moscow for his republic. In 1978, tens of thousands dared to go into the streets and protest a proposal from Moscow to make Russian the only official language in Georgia, as in all other Soviet republics. Indeed, Georgia had
been the
only
republic to have a constitution in which both Georgian and Russian were official languages—in all others, it was Russian only. Shevardnadze waded into the massive crowd and promised to do all he could to revoke the new law. The Kremlin backed down. Large demonstrations in the USSR were unheard of, never mind the Kremlin’s backing down to the leader of a Soviet republic.

Then, in 1985, Shevardnadze was appointed Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet foreign minister. A Georgian to lead the mighty Soviet foreign policy machine! And what’s more, a boy from a tiny village called Mamati in the backwoods farming region of Guria.

Though many Georgians said Shevardnadze never did anything that might endanger his political career, some events suggest otherwise. His wife-to-be, Nanuli, had initially resisted his marriage proposals. Her father had been executed in the 1930s as an enemy of the state. She feared that this could either endanger Eduard’s life or at least put an end to his budding political future.

Shevardnadze persisted with his marriage proposals, ignoring the risks, and they married in 1951.

While Georgians were proud that one of theirs had become the USSR’s foreign minister, Communist bureaucrats in Moscow reacted with disbelief. After Stalin and Beria, another Georgian, and as foreign minister? Many scoffed at Shevardnadze’s heavily accented Russian and said he wouldn’t be up to the task.

He was soon to be a hate figure in Moscow among many Russian politicians as the man who “gave away” East Germany and helped bring down the Berlin Wall, and, along with Gorbachev, allegedly plotted to wreck the empire.

Then came the “Hundred Meters War” that wrecked Georgia’s capital in the winter of 1991–92 as Zviad Gamsakhurdia was driven from power. Georgia’s new leaders, the dramatist Ioseliani and the large-canvas painter and general hell-raiser Kitovani, however, were unable to secure international recognition, given their checkered reputations and the fact that Gamsakhurdia was ousted in a coup.

Georgia could not even secure a seat at the United Nations, practically
alone among former Soviet republics. Ioseliani and Kitovani begged Shevardnadze to come back from Moscow, where he was out of politics, in order to confer a degree of legitimacy on their rule. Hundreds greeted him at the airport, tossing roses at his feet or kneeling. Again, the “Machiavellian Manipulator” as Miracle Man. With Shevardnadze’s major international creds, Georgia was back on the map. Aid started to flow into the devastated country.

Even when Shevardnadze officially quit his post of head of state in 1993 in a disagreement with parliament over whether or not to sign a “peace plan” with the independence-minded Abkhaz, mediated by the Russians, thousands came into the streets and got on their knees again, asking him to reconsider. He did, and parliament agreed to sign on to the peace plan. He stayed, only to see Abkhazia fall several weeks later—the plan indeed appeared in hindsight to contain elements of a ruse.

SHEVARDNADZE WAS LAST
elected in 2000, but there were more allegations of irregularities.

“The day after that election, I went into his office,” one of his top aides (who I will call “The Witness”) told me. “I saw emptiness in his eyes. Shevardnadze the politician died for me on that day. It was clear he had neither the desire nor the will to keep governing.”

SHEVARDNADZE MADE ONE
last electoral appearance, on November 2, 2003, to lead his “Citizens Union” ruling party in parliamentary polls. Most of his serious allies had deserted him, replaced by dubious characters known for corruption or bizarre behavior. Even with all the weight of the state behind it, Shevardnadze’s “Citizens Union” came in only second in the elections, losing to the young Saakashvili’s National Movement. Even that second-place result was pumped up by a lot of ballot stuffing.

Meanwhile, Shevardnadze was living in a Potemkin village created by the asset-stripping sycophants around him, most of whom hailed “our victory,” assuring the seventy-six-year-old president that all was well. In
reality, his approval ratings had fallen to a microscopic 3 percent. Only one aide, the Witness, had the guts to tell the president that if a “critical mass” of people came out into the streets to protest, he could be forced to resign. “Shevardnadze smiled and said I might turn out to be right, almost as if he wanted things to turn out that way.”

A COUPLE OF
nights before the day of reckoning, I went to Shevardnadze’s State Chancellery. The building was empty and dark, and thousands of protesters had already assembled outside, screaming epithets like “Shevardnadze should be buried alive.” Only the Witness remained in his office. All other aides had deserted. The Witness spoke in the past tense about Shevardnadze, as if it was all over. It was.

The Witness told me of how Shevardnadze, who had survived two serious assassination attempts and decades of intrigue and pressure, was simply not interested in ruling anymore. The way the “revolution” unfolded would affirm that.

The last year saw Shevardnadze spending much of his time at the side of his beloved and badly ailing wife, Nanuli, who regularly stayed up all night. He would often come to work at seven a.m., only after he was sure she was finally asleep. Essentially a lifelong teetotaler who drank sparingly and only during obligatory state functions but never showed any sign of drunkenness, he had understandably taken to sipping a bit of cognac now and then to calm his nerves.

“Of course, there have been many mistakes,” said the Witness. “Much could have and should have been done differently,” he said, speaking of the unbridled corruption and disorder in Georgia. “But if we speak about one man, he did his best.”

Shevardnadze’s biggest mistake was undoubtedly buying in to that wildly disorganized incursion into Abkhazia, a military operation that wasn’t one, at least if you define it as having a clear objective. At the time, given that the art warlords Kitovani and Ioseliani were calling the shots, he perhaps thought he had no choice until he could sideline them and end the war. A riskier but perhaps more principled decision might have been
to quit immediately, leaving two of the biggest, most destructive clowns in Georgian political history to fend for themselves. The fact he did not added fuel to the flames that Shevy preferred his seat of power (
savardzeli
) over all else.

THE DECISIVE DAY
was upon us. Shevardnadze vowed to go to parliament to open the new session, but there was no quorum—too many deputies were boycotting because of the election fraud. The Rose Revolution contingent led by Saakashvili vowed to block the session from taking place. A few fistfights broke out a few hundred meters away from the building.

That is when it became apparent that the vaunted state machine behind Shevardnadze was a fiction. Perhaps he wanted it that way.

Within minutes, the police stationed around parliament and the presidential building let the now tens of thousands of demonstrators flow through like water. (The government had not bothered to pay the police for months.) Next to parliament, army officers vowed not to intervene in what was becoming the inevitable. (The government hadn’t bothered to pay them for months either.) The parliament session was to begin at four p.m. At 3:55, Shevy called the Witness. “What should I say to open parliament?” he asked. “We don’t have a quorum.”

“Unfortunately, we are surrounded,” came the answer from the Witness, a physicist-empiricist not prone to euphemisms.

Shevardnadze answered that he understood.

As the session began, Mikheil Saakashvili, leader of the Rose Revolution, barged into the hall with hundreds of supporters, overwhelming a few guards at the door with relative ease. I was squeezed into the middle of the crowd. In his hand and in front of his bulletproof vest, Saakashvili held a bouquet of roses. He began shouting at Shevardnadze, who looked surprised and ashen. The president, after a few seconds in a trancelike state, was instantly spirited away to his residence on a hillside a few miles away.

Once back at his residence, Shevardnadze gave a rambling, nearly
incomprehensible interview in which he expressed dismay and surprise, saying he had raised pensions and that the country’s agriculture sector was improving. Then he announced a “State of Emergency,” but because he had no loyal troops to rely on, he later admitted to me during an interview that it was more of a temporary way to cool passions than a serious measure, especially given that his army had effectively deserted him.

The next day, opposition delegates went to meet with the president. With surprising calm, Shevardnadze agreed to resign, in order to avoid bloodshed, he said. Thus, a peaceful transfer of power had taken place in a former Soviet state, a rarity.

Tens of thousands of Georgians descended on the main Rustaveli Avenue, almost everyone drinking wine and dancing, a national celebration.

Although he expressed occasional moments of bitterness, relief at having been spared the burden of his supposedly unshakable addiction to power was dominant. On the day after he resigned, Shevardnadze calmly and in high spirits went to his office and collected the memorabilia of thirty years in power: photographs with other world leaders, gifts from foreign dignitaries, and other trinkets. He and a secretary placed them in a box. Smilingly, he went home to his presidential residence high above the city, a comfort he was allowed to keep by Georgia’s new rulers out of general respect.

A few dozen jeerers caught wind of his foray to retrieve his office belongings. They gathered outside the presidential building, expecting him to whisk past in his car, pretending not to notice. Instead, Shevardnadze insisted on stopping, shocking the demonstrators by getting out and engaging them in conversation.

“My time is over,” he told them, smiling disarmingly. “Let’s see what these young people can do with Georgia now …”

A few days later I went to see Shevardnadze. His eyes were clear and sharp, his voice assured. His recliner might have been destroyed in flames, but for the first time, the “Old Man” looked relaxed, and actually glad to be relieved of dealing with power.

• • •

WE MET A
few more times over the years, most recently in May 2011, Shevardnadze at the time eighty-three but in remarkably strong health for a man whose life had been so shaped by upheaval.

We discussed a few main things. Shevardnadze had previously admitted that the war in Abkhazia during the early 1990s had clearly been a mistake, but said he had been powerless to stop it, as he was still at that early stage at the mercy of the warlords Kitovani and Ioseliani and was not even formally commander in chief of the “National Guard.”

Then there was the subject of the Soviet Union. Could it have been reformed or dismantled less violently?

“No possibility,” he said, repeating exactly the same thing he had told me fifteen years earlier.

The “Silver Fox” admitted that he had not anticipated the speed with which the empire would self-destruct. It had been he and Kremlin leader Gorbachev who on a walk along a Black Sea beach in 1985 agreed that “we cannot go on like this.” What they meant was that the Soviet system was an untenable entity.

“I was convinced the Soviet Union would disintegrate. But to be honest, I was off by ten or fifteen years,” reflected Shevardnadze, the former Soviet Politburo member. “I did not at all anticipate the USSR would fall apart so quickly.”

Shevardnadze made another prediction he had made before: that Russia itself would break down further, along ethnic lines, especially in the hopelessly corrupt Islamist insurrection–troubled regions of Chechnya, Dagestan, and some others—all of which are almost totally dependent on billions of dollars, most of it used corruptly, to prop up local chieftains, like the technically pro-Moscow chieftain, Ramzan Kadyrov.