Eduard Shevardnadze - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Shevardnadze was born in Mamati, Lanchkhuti, Transcaucasian SFSR, Soviet Union on 25 January 1928. Ambrose, his father, worked as a teacher and was a devoted communist and party official. He was a cousin of Georgian painter and intellectual Dimitri Shevardnadze purged during Stalinist repressions. His mother however had little respect for the communist government and opposed both Shevardnadze's and his father's party career. In 1937, during the Great Purge, his father, who had abandoned Menshevism for Bolshevism in the mid-1920s, was arrested but was released due to the intervention of an NKVD officer who had been his pupil. The father of his wife, Nanuli Shevardnadze, was killed by the authorities at the height of the purge. At first Nanuli rejected Shevardnadze's marriage proposal, fearing that her family background would ruin Shevardnadze's party career. These fears were well justified as many other couples had lost their life for the very same reason. The two married in 1951.

He joined the Georgian Communist Party (GCP) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1948 at the age of twenty. He rose steadily through the ranks of the Georgian Komsomol, and eventually become its First Secretary after serving a term as Second Secretary. It was during his Komsomol First Secretaryship that Shevardnadze would meet Mikhail Gorbachev for his first time. Shevardnadze claims that he grew disillusioned with the Soviet political system following Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the 20th CPSU Congress. Like many Soviets, the crimes perpetrated by Joseph Stalin horrified Shevardnadze, and the Soviet government's response to the 1956 Georgian demonstrations shocked him even more. He was demoted in 1961 by the Politburo of the Georgian Communist Party after offending a senior official. His demotion led him to endure several years of obscurity before returning to attention as a First Secretary of a city district in Tbilisi. Shevardnadze challenged Tbilisi First Secretary Otari Lolashvili, and later charged him for corrupion. Shevardnadze left party work after getting appointed to First Deputy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Georgian SSR in 1964. It was his successful attempt at putting Lolashvili behind bar's which got him promoted to the First Deputyship. In 1965 he was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs of the Georgian SSR. After initiatsing a successful anti-corruption campaign supported by the Soviet government Shevardnadze was voted-in as Second Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party. As Minister of Internal Affairs Shevardnadze ordered the arrest of more than 25,000 people; 17,000 of these being party members, many government ministers and 70 KGB officials. Several other Georgians would lose their life and/or would face torturing by the authorities. Shevardnadze's corruption campaign increased public enmity against him. However, it was these anti-corruption campaigns which garnered the interest of the Soviet government, and in turn, his promotion to the First Secretaryship after Vasil Mzhavanadze's resignation.