Leadership Quote by Eduard Shevardnadze

Eradicating corruption is the easy part to cheer and the hard part to live on. Shevardnadze’s line carries the weary pragmatism of a post-Soviet leader who watched “anti-corruption” become both a genuine reform agenda and a convenient political weapon. The sentence is built as a warning against moralism-as-policy: if governance is reduced to purges, prosecutions, and purity tests, the state can end up cleaner on paper but hollow in capacity.

The subtext is institutional. Corruption is not just a bad habit; in brittle systems it often doubles as an informal welfare state, a grease for stalled bureaucracies, a way people survive when salaries don’t. Strip that away without building credible courts, predictable regulation, functioning public services, and legitimate political competition, and you can trigger the very instability reformers claim to prevent. “Not enough” is doing heavy lifting here: it implies sequencing and substitution. Anti-corruption cannot substitute for economic strategy, national cohesion, security, or trust.

Context matters because Shevardnadze straddled two eras. As Gorbachev’s foreign minister he helped unwind an empire; as Georgia’s head of state he faced civil conflict, weak institutions, and endemic graft, and later watched reformers define themselves against his alleged corruption. The line reads like a preemptive rebuttal to both critics and admirers: yes, corruption corrodes legitimacy, but legitimacy also depends on something harder to sloganize - competence, stability, and a social contract that doesn’t collapse the moment the bribes stop.