b. January 25, 1928
MEETS WITH JAMES A. BAKER, III,
in Irkutsk (Russia), USSR, August 2, 1990
Former Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze and U.S. Secretary of State Baker and this meeting are back in the news again, as the twentieth anniversary of the (first) Gulf War is being commemorated. As a symposium on the war was being held at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, the Houston Chronicle wrote that the war "provided definitive evidence that the Cold War had ended, paving the way for an international coalition to join forces against a common foe." The paper continued, "That was illustrated when Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze issued a joint condemnation of the Iraqi invasion."
It happened that Baker and Shevardnadze were holding a foreign-ministerial level "summit," on August 2, 1990, in Irkutsk, when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was discovered, and this circumstance provided some of the backstory for the "joint condemnation." A bit of this history can be read here, in an excerpt from Chapter Three of RUSSIA REDUX.
Eduard Shevardnadze has had a rather full and at times tumultuous career: KGB, Soviet Georgian leader, Soviet Foreign Minister, and (the second) post-Soviet Georgian leader.
A flavor of this and another photograph can be found here.
