His anti-corruption work quickly garnered the interest of the Soviet government, and Shevardnadze was appointed to First Deputy of the Ministry 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.

Not surprisingly, Abashidze saw this as a threat to his position and the continued semi-independence of Ajaria, and denounced the downfall of Shevardnadze as a " coup ".

Tengiz Kitovani () ( born June 9, 1938 ) is a retired Georgian politician and military commander with high-profile involvement in the Georgian Civil War early in the 1990s when he commanded the National Guard of Georgia and served as a Defense Minister until being gradually sidelined by Eduard Shevardnadze who had earlier been invited to lead the nation after a successful coup d ' etat launched by Kitovani and his allies against President Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

Following a crisis involving allegations of ballot fraud in the 2003 parliamentary elections, Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as president on November 23, 2003, in the bloodless Rose Revolution.

Shevardnadze returned briefly as Soviet Foreign Minister in November 1991 but resigned with Gorbachev the following month when the Soviet Union was formally dissolved.

Involved in national politics since 1995, he became president on 25 January 2004 after President Eduard Shevardnadze resigned in the November 2003 bloodless " Rose Revolution " led by Saakashvili and his political allies, Nino Burjanadze and Zurab Zhvania.

After an increasingly tense two weeks of demonstrations, Shevardnadze resigned as President on 23 November, to be replaced on an interim basis by parliamentary speaker Nino Burjanadze.

The terms of the Georgian constitution automatically made her the acting president when Shevardnadze resigned on 23 November.

However, Zhvania fell out with Shevardnadze over a corruption scandal and resigned as speaker on 1 November 2001.

In September 2001, Saakashvili resigned from Shevardnadze's government and party on the grounds that corruption had penetrated to the very centre of the Georgian government and that Shevardnadze lacked the will to deal with it.

Because of Yanayev's more conservative views, Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduard Shevardnadze resigned from office to protest against the increasing numbers of conservatives in top political offices.

He resigned from his post as First Secretary on September 28, 1972, and was replaced by his ambitious Interior Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze.

In September 2003, former Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze made a last minute decision not to sign this agreement with the Vatican after a protest rally took place in Tbilisi, provoked from and backed by the Georgian Orthodox Church.

However, as early as 1988, then-Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze had discussed the possibility of a withdrawal from Cam Ranh Bay, and concrete naval reductions were realised by 1990.

In an open letter to Shevardnadze, dated April 19, 1992, Gamsakhurdia claimed that " my so-called confession was necessitated ... if there had been no ' confession ' and my release from the prison in 1979 had not taken place, then there would not have been a rise of the national movement.

Eduard Ambrosis dze Shevardnadze ( ; born 25 January 1928 ) is a former Soviet minister of foreign affairs, and later, Georgian statesman from the height to the end of the Cold War.

Original CIA file on Shevardnadze, seized from the former United States Embassy in Tehran

There was another problem facing Shevardnadze during the 1978 demonstrations, some leading Abkhaz intellectuals were writing to Leonid Brezhnev in the hope that he would let the Abkhaz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic secede from Georgia and merge into the Russian SFSR.

During the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union descended into crisis, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze became increasingly estranged from each other over policy differences.

After graduation, while on internship in the New York law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler in early 1995, Saakashvili was approached by Zurab Zhvania, an old friend from Georgia who was working on behalf of President Eduard Shevardnadze to enter politics.

In 1995, Burjanadze was elected to the Parliament of Georgia for the Union of Citizens of Georgia ( UCG ) then chaired by the President of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze and supported financially by her father Anzor Burjanadze, a wealthy businessman .. She first chaired the Parliamentary Committee for Constitutional Law from 1998 to 1999, and the Parliamentary Committee for International Relations from 2000 to 2001.

First signs of revival can be seen from the 1970s, when Eduard Shevardnadze, then secretary of the Georgian SSR's Communist Party, adopted a more tolerant stance, and new Patriarch Ilia II could from 1977 renovate derelict churches, and even build new ones.

On April 14, 2003, Kmara made its first major appearance, staging a march of some 200 students from the Tbilisi State University to the State Chancellery, chanting their slogan " kmara " and demanding resignation of the " corrupt government " and President Shevardnadze.

Despite criticism from the opposition, Eduard Shevardnadze, President of Georgia, refused to deploy troops against Abkhazia.

Shevardnadze failed to have Kitovani ’ s force withdrawn from Abkhazia and the country became involved in a thirteen-month-long war which would end in Georgia ’ s loss of control over most of Abkhazia.

Kitovani however blamed Shevardnadze for preventing him from following up an offensive on Sukhumi with an attack on the Abkhaz stronghold in Gudauta, home to a Russian military base which supplied the secessionist forces with instructors and munitions.

Since early 2000s, Kitovani has lived in Moscow from where he harshly criticized the Shevardnadze government on several occasions.

On August 29, 1995 there was an attempt on the life of, the then president, Eduard Shevardnadze after which Giorgadze was removed from his post.

The Georgian Communist Party chief, Eduard Shevardnadze, called for the deployment of an élite Soviet special unit Alpha Group from Moscow.

Zviad Gamsakhurdia's supporters, the so-called Zviadists staged mass demonstrations against the post-coup government led by the former Communist leader Eduard Shevardnadze in various parts of Georgia and organized armed groups which prevented the government forces from taking control of Samegrelo, the ex-President's home province.

Later, he distanced himself from Abashidze, remaining, however, in opposition to Eduard Shevardnadze ’ s government.

While never proven, it is said that Shevardnadze after taking office, asked all leading officials to show their left hands ; he then ordered those who used Western produced watches to replace them with Soviet ones.

He met then Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze multiple times, as part of a regular series of negotiations during his two years in office.

In Georgia, the government of Eduard Shevardnadze ( who was then First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party ) arrested Gamsakhurdia and his fellow dissident Merab Kostava.

It was during his Komsomol First Secretaryship that Shevardnadze would meet Mikhail Gorbachev for his first time.

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.

Shevardnadze was appointed to the First Secretaryship of the Georgian Communist Party by the Soviet government with the task of suppressing the grey and black-market capitalism that had grown under Vasil Mzhavanadze's rule.

Eduard Shevardnadze, the country's interior minister between 1964 and 1972, gained a reputation as a fighter of corruption and engineered the removal of Vasil Mzhavanadze, the corrupt First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party.

Shevardnadze ascended to the post of First Secretary with the blessings of Moscow.

On July 1, 1985 Gorbachev promoted Eduard Shevardnadze First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party to full member of the Politburo, and the following day appointed Shevardnadze as Minister of Foreign Affairs replacing Andrei Gromyko.

Patiashvili, a nondescript party loyalist, succeeded Eduard Shevardnadze as the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party in 1985.

The action was the beginning of the end of the rule of Georgian First Secretary Vasil Mzhavanadze, and his replacement in that job by Eduard Shevardnadze.