Eduard Shevardnadze has died. Former Soviet foreign minister and President of Georgia died after a long illness.

Eduard Shevardnadze died at the age of 86 years. That was his personal assistant announced on Monday. Shevardnadze from 1992 to 2003, President of Georgia. Previously, he acted in the second half of the eighties as Soviet foreign minister under President Mikhail Gorbachev. He coined the policies of perestroika and glasnost with decisive and was crucial for German reunification.

Shevardnadze was born in 1928 in the Georgian Mamati near the Black Sea. His father was a teacher of Russian language and literature in Dsimiti and is also member of the Supreme Soviet of Georgia.

The day after his appointment as party secretary of the CPSU Gorbachev convened on July 2, 1985 Shevardnadze as Foreign Minister. This time was totally inexperienced in diplomatic issues. However, it quickly grew in stature and coined in the following five and a half years, the new foreign policy of the Soviet Union.

Associated with his name are the most important foreign policy developments of that period: the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the success of the disarmament policy, toleration and promotion of the political upheavals in Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany and the cooperation with the U.S. and the other countries of the West against Iraq in the Gulf crisis.

Eduard Shevarnadze Dead:Return to Georgia

Shevardnadze’s role ended in Moscow, when President Boris Yeltsin in December 1991, the Soviet Foreign Ministry was taken over by the Russian Foreign Ministry. In the spring of the following year Shevardnadze returned to his then independent homeland Georgia and was elected a little later as head of state. He survived two assassination attempts. After weeks of protests, he joined back in 2003 by the Office. Then he led a secluded life.

Shevardnadze maintained a close political friendship with the former German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher.

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