National Security Archive ANN: The Shevardnadze File: Late Soviet Foreign Minister Helped End the Cold War

The Shevardnadze File: Late Soviet Foreign Minister Helped End the Cold War

Politburo Notes and Memcons Detail Surprising Rise, "New Thinking" Candor, Diplomatic Partnerships, and Sense of Missed Opportunities

Eduard Amvrosievich Shevardnadze, In Memoriam

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 481
Posted July 24, 2014

Compiled and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton

For more information contact:
202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

Washington, D.C., July 24, 2014 -- Former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who passed away on July 7, brought a new diplomatic style and candor to bear in changing U.S.-Soviet relations in the late 1980s and ending the Cold War, according to Soviet and U.S. declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).

The posting includes the 1985 Politburo minutes of Shevardnadze's surprise selection as foreign minister, contrasted with the behind-the-scenes account from senior Central Committee official Anatoly Chernyaev in his diary. The e-book also includes the transcripts of Shevardnadze's remarkable first conversations with his American counterparts, George Shultz (in the Reagan administration) and James Baker (in the George H.W. Bush administration); other memcons featuring Shevardnadze's leading role in summit meetings between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and American presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and Shevardnadze's last conversation with Bush before the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Shevardnadze's rise to leadership of the Foreign Ministry in 1985, only months after Gorbachev became general secretary, was a "bolt from the blue," in Chernyaev's words. Shevardnadze's talks with Shultz brought a whole new tone to U.S.-Soviet discourse, while the Soviet minister's growing friendship with Baker, including 1989's fly-fishing outing in Wyoming, led to actual partnership between the former Cold War adversaries by the time of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But the memcons also reflect Shevardnadze's frustration with American "pauses" and missed opportunities for dramatic arms reductions across the board, and for earlier domestic political transformation in the Soviet Union.

The National Security Archive obtained the Shevardnadze documents through Freedom of Information Act requests to the Reagan and Bush presidential libraries and to the U.S. State Department, and through generous donations from Anatoly Chernyaev. Additional material comes from the files of the Gorbachev Foundation, the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, and the former Communist Party (SED) archives in Germany.


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