Eduard Amvrosevich Shevardnadze (born 1928) rose to prominence as the foreign minister of the U.S.S.R. under Mikhail Gorbachev. After the breakup of the Soviet Union he was elected President of his native Georgia.

At the end of the September 1990 mini-summit conference in Helsinki, while Presidents Bush and Gorbachev were giving their television press conference, the cameras also focused on the front row of VIPs--Barbara Bush, Raisa Gorbachev, James Baker (the American secretary of state), and Eduard Shevardnadze (the Soviet foreign minister). As with each of the annual summits between the United States and the Soviet Union after 1985, somewhere in every picture, standing near Gorbachev, was Eduard Shevardnadze. Thus, it was a shock not only to the Soviet president but throughout the U.S.S.R. and abroad when Shevardnadze suddenly resigned December 20, 1990. He left with an ambiguous warning of an impending dictatorship.

In his post of...