Eduard Shevardnadze was amazed to learn that he had become a celebrity in the United States. The former Soviet foreign minister was the first official visitor to see George Bush after the president got out of the hospital early last week. Later, on a speaking tour, the 63-year-old Shevardnadze got a warm welcome from groups as diverse as the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the Food Marketing Institute in Chicago. He rubbed shoulders with such Boston glitterati as Jackie Onassis and the Kennedy clan. Once Mikhail Gorbachev’s First Friend and political soul mate, Shevardnadze walked out on the Soviet president last December, warning that “dictatorship is coming.” But instead of disappearing into the wilderness, Shevardnadze has emerged as a kind of Soviet Henry Kissinger-a Mr. Glasnost for the global talk-and-diplomacy circuit.
Shevardnadze is driven by a sense of urgency, a feeling that the dangers facing the Soviet Union have deepened since he quit. “The social tensions are even greater now,” he told NEWSWEEK, “and economically the situation is even worse.” He warns that “if we have a chaotic situation in the country, dictators can arise on the right or on the left.” Shevardnadze has two main platforms for his new role as an insider on the outside. One is his own nonprofit enterprise, the Foreign Policy Association, an independent think tank in a country that still tends to stifle private initiatives. The other is a yet-unnamed nationwide democratic party that he and other reformers, including Gavriil Popov, the radical mayor of Moscow, are trying to get started. Shevardnadze said last week that his own resignation was intended to show “that democracy requires struggle, and it requires sacrifice.”
The U.S. visit was intended partly to raise money for the new think tank. For 24 days of public speaking, Shevardnadze was being paid $100,000 plus expenses by Diomedes, Inc., a San Francisco firm specializing in U.S.-Soviet joint ventures. “We could never have organized something like this ourselves,” said Sergei Tarasenko, Shevardnadze’s longtime aide. Launching the venture in Moscow was hard enough. The office there lacks such basic tools as computers and fax machines. Shevardnadze gave up his Kremlin shopping perks along with his government post, and his aides say it took weeks of haggling just to get a phone line and a few desks and chairs. “We are having firsthand experience with the Soviet market economy,” said Tarasenko. “It’s awful.”
In a meeting with Secretary of State James Baker, Shevardnadze insisted that the new political party will help Gorbachev. “He believes Gorbachev needs to have a powerful force on the left demanding reform as a counterweight to the right, which is demanding retrenchment,” said a Baker aide. Gorbachev may not view the new party so benignly. But Shevardnadze pleaded Gorbachev’s case, too. He spoke out publicly in support of Moscow’s latest request for emergency aid to buy American food and privately urged Bush to do all he could to bolster the Soviet leader. Bush, who previously expressed doubts about the food aid, last week indicated he was inclined to grant the request.
Shevardnadze thinks Gorbachev has only “a few months” in which to stabilize the Soviet Union. But the former foreign minister feels quite relaxed and even liberated about his own new role. “From a personal point of view, I find this life to be much more comfortable,” he says. “There used to be all kinds of barriers on whom I could see and what I could say. It’s wonderful now, being a free individual.”
