THE MOSCOW REFORM TEAM 131release some time later.^17 His own wife Nanuli had started by rejecting
his proposal of marriage for fear that her father’s execution as an
enemy of the people would ruin Shevardnadze’s career.^18 She did, how-
ever, eventually agree to the wedding and now had a busy life in
Moscow as she looked after the family there while her own daughter
went out to work.^19
People found Shevardnadze charming and intelligent – not at all
like a conventional Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister. (The only one they
could remember was stony-faced Gromyko, who rationed his smiles
and chilled every diplomatic conversation.) His curly silver hair lent a
patrician appearance. Like Gorbachëv, he had literary interests. He
also loved football and followed Tbilisi Dinamo. Unusually for a Geor-
gian, he did not smoke.^20 As a seven-year-old, he had written a paean
to Stalin that appeared in a children’s journal.^21 His personal ambition
remained with him in adulthood, and he undoubtedly had a ruthless
side: for five years from 1967 he was Georgia’s Minister of Internal
Affairs and was not remembered for gentle policing methods. Among
Georgians he was notorious for his obsequiousness to the General
Secretary. He declared to the Party Congress in 1976 that whereas
generations of scientists said that the sun rises in the east, he asserted
that for Georgia’s people it had risen in the north, in Moscow. In 1980
he assured a Party Central Committee plenum that people in Brazil
had told him that no statesman in the world was more authoritative
than Leonid Brezhnev.^22 Only political sophisticates understood that
this was his way of getting Moscow to leave Georgia alone.^23
Shevardnadze recognized that the new direction in foreign policy
depended on Gorbachëv’s survival in power.^24 He also understood that
he owed his own elevation entirely to the General Secretary. Rather
archly, he described himself as his ‘feudal vassal’.^25 As he started to
show extravagant admiration for Gorbachëv, he reasoned that a new
‘cult of the individual’ would benefit the cause of reform. On Gor-
bachëv’s birthday, he delivered a eulogy so cloying that it earned a
rebuke from the General Secretary.^26 This failed to discourage him
from heaping praise on Gorbachëv’s draft report for the Party Con-
gress: ‘Since Lenin, I can’t remember such a document. We see here a
new level of Marxist-Leninist thinking.’^27
Alexander Yakovlev, who left the Institute of the World Economy
and International Relations to become head of the Party Propaganda
Department on 5 July 1985, squashed any idea about establishing a
cult.^28 He and Gorbachëv believed that perestroika required a change