THE obscure provincial leader was at first sight an unlikely choice to be foreign minister of the world’s largest country. Eduard Shevardnadze did not even want the job: he spoke only his native Georgian and heavily accented Russian, had no important foreign contacts, and had barely travelled abroad. But Mikhail Gorbachev was immovable. The new Soviet leader wanted big changes—and the “Silver Fox”, his friend since the 1950s, to make them.

After decades in which policy had crunched downhill like a glacier, the new man at the foreign ministry brought stunning shifts. Its trademark surly silence gave way to openness and charm. Taboos flew out of the window. He decried ideology and the class struggle, once the mainsprings of foreign policy, as useless. Arms spending too: it brought weakness, not strength. Only friendship with the West could end backwardness and isolation.

Deeds matched the words. He ended the Soviet Union’s proxy wars in Africa, Latin America and Asia, hurrying the Red Army home from its futile and bloody mission in Afghanistan. At arms-control talks with America knotty negotiating problems unravelled overnight. The danger of nuclear war abated. He buried most of the Soviet empire in Europe, and played midwife to a united Germany, saying allies were better than subjects: “It is time to realise that neither socialism, nor friendship, nor good-neighbourliness, nor respect, can be produced by bayonets, tanks or blood.”

Even hawkish Americans realised that the Soviet Union truly wanted to end the cold war. Mr Shevardnadze forged notable friendships with his American and German counterparts. The hardliners back home, with their grumbling jargon and rigid mindsets, were a greater obstacle.

Seemingly, he was cut from the same cloth. He had joined the party at the height of the Stalin era. A ferocious local official, he brought even the sybaritic Georgians to follow Party discipline. A possibly apocryphal story relates how he called a show of hands on some anodyne motion at a meeting of senior officials, on his first day as anti-corruption chief there. As the grey-clad arms went up, he inspected every wrist—and remarked caustically how strange it was that the servants of the proletariat could afford pricey Western watches. Other tactics were tougher: mass arrests, beatings, torture and executions. He jailed dissidents and cracked down on those trying to defend Georgian language and culture from Russification.

It worked well, for him. Having shown the Kremlin the extent of corruption in Georgia, he was given the republic to run. Control of the best food, wine, scenery and hospitality in the Soviet Union proved a fine way to forge important friendships.

But behind the outward appearance of sycophantic loyalty to a brutal system was a different man. Yes, he had been a true believer, but he also knew that his father had narrowly escaped death in Stalin’s purges. His beloved Nanuli was the daughter of an enemy of the people, but he risked his career and married her anyway—declining to “sacrifice love to hatred”, he wrote later. He secretly shared his despair over the Soviet Union’s failures with the young Mr Gorbachev, his counterpart in the nearby Russian province of Stavropol. Both men saw that only radical change could avert catastrophic collapse.

Outfoxed

But unlike Mr Gorbachev, the Georgian went further. Back home he had allowed the making of “Repentance”, an explosive allegorical film (banned by censors) about the crimes of Stalinism. His experiments in economic liberalisation in Soviet Georgia had been successful, but they made him conclude that socialism was unworkable, not reformable. He saw far more clearly than his boss the danger of a hardline backlash. Their friendship frayed. As the shadows darkened over Moscow in the winter of 1990, he spectacularly resigned, with an emotional speech warning of looming dictatorship. For many, that marked the real end of the era of glasnost and perestroika.

After the Soviet collapse in 1991 Mr Shevardnadze headed home to Georgia, where independence had brought bloody strife and economic collapse. Though he became the only politician to have been foreign minister of one country and head of state of another, his record was at best mixed. He eventually ended the fighting, jailing two of the warlords who had put him in power, sidelining the third, and escaping several assassination attempts.

But for all his courage, skill and brains, he had always been better at preaching democracy than practising it. Though not personally corrupt, he ruled through an intricate web of favours and blackmail. For many Georgians, sleaze and stagnation soon came to outweigh stability.

There were some successes. New east-west oil and gas pipelines across Georgian territory helped break Russia’s export monopoly, and put the country on America’s map. He encouraged bright young Georgians to study abroad; one of them was his later nemesis, a brash, polygot lawyer called Mikheil Saakashvili. Egregious election-rigging in 2003 sparked the “Rose revolution”, in which an indignant mob, led by the glitzy young English-speakers, hustled a bewildered and indignant “Silver Fox” into retirement. Too much democracy, he said crossly, was a mistake.