"Shevardnadze, your century was the 20th. Now it is the 21st," read a placard as protesters swarmed the Georgian Parliament.
Eduard Shevardnadze was indeed an icon of the late 20th century. As Soviet foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, he played a key role in ending the Cold War by pushing through the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, signing landmark arms-control agreements, and helping negotiate German reunification in 1990.
As president of independent Georgia, however, the 75-year-old Shevardnadze quickly lost his heroic aura as the country was ravaged by corruption, bled by crime and sank into poverty.
Born on Jan. 25, 1928, in the village of Mamati near Georgia's Black Sea coast, Shevardnadze rose through the ranks of the Communist Party, its Komsomol youth organization and Georgia's police force.
As the Soviet republic's interior minister, he gained a reputation for purging corrupt officials and forcing them to give up ill-gotten cars, mansions and other property.
Shevardnadze was named Communist Party chief of Georgia in 1972 and Soviet foreign minister in 1985. He resigned from the job five years later to protest plans to use force to quell unrest in the Soviet Union. He joined Boris Yeltsin in resisting an attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, and returned to the foreign minister's job briefly later that year.
Shevardnadze returned to Georgia after its first elected president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was ousted in a 1992 coup; Shevardnadze was elected speaker of parliament and became the country's leader. Gamsakhurdia died under mysterious circumstances in 1993, and Shevardnadze was elected president for his first five-year term in 1995 under a new constitution.
The country he inherited was wracked by chaos. Fighting broke out in 1990 in the northern province of South Ossetia, bordering on Russia, after the nationalist Georgian government voted to deprive the province of its autonomy. The region has won de facto independence from Tbilisi.
Another secessionist uprising erupted in the province of Abkhazia. The small region, bordered by the Black Sea and Russia, has been effectively independent since separatists drove out government forces during a 1992-1993 war. The two sides reached a ceasefire in 1994, but peace talks on a political solution have stalled.
Then there was economic hardship. In addition to losses from the Abkhazian conflict, Georgia has lost Soviet-era orders for its factories. Every winter, Georgians suffer long gas and electricity outages and the average salary hovers just around 100 lari (US$50). In spite of Shevardnadze's Communist-era record as a "clean-hands" politician, corruption still grips the country at every level, and his lieutenants have earned notoriety by building extravagant villas and whizzing about in luxury cars.
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