Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister and Georgian president who died Monday at age 86, wasn't an effective leader. Had Western leaders paid closer attention to what he said when he was alive, though, they would have been better prepared for today's crisis in Ukraine.
For the last 18 years of his political career, Shevardnadze was mostly swept along by the tide of events. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pressed him into service as foreign minister in 1985, despite his protests that he had never worked as a diplomat or learned a foreign language. As such, he played a key role in dismantling the brutal regime built in large part by another Georgian, Josef Stalin, whose prison camps his father had barely avoided. Germans are still grateful to both Gorbachev and Shevardnadze for their country's reunification, which the former Soviet foreign minister described in his memoir as inevitable: "There was no other logic."
Russia was never comfortable with that logic. In December 1990, Shevardnadze abruptly resigned, ostensibly to warn Gorbachev that a backlash was brewing within the party hierarchy. In 1991, Shevardnadze watched the attempted coup d'etat from the sidelines, returning to the foreign ministry only briefly to help Gorbachev with the futile task of salvaging the Soviet Union in some form. He rightly saw the dangers in Ukraine's decision to secede from the union, noting Russian nationalists' early calls for the return of Crimea, which Nikita Khrushchev had made part of Ukraine.