Leadership Quote by Eduard Shevardnadze

Corruption, in Shevardnadze's framing, isn't a moral aberration so much as a system with incentives: it has "motivations". That phrasing matters. It shifts the conversation from hunting villains to dissecting machinery - the informal taxes, patronage networks, and survival strategies that flourish when the state is weak or predatory. The line reads like a reformer's diagnosis, but also like a seasoned operator's warning: if you treat corruption as a few bad apples, it will simply reroute around your crackdowns.

The insistence that one must "thoroughly study" the phenomenon carries a double edge. On one hand, it's technocratic realism: corruption is adaptive, local, and often rational for people trapped inside it. On the other, it buys time and diffuses blame, a familiar move in political rhetoric - the promise of inquiry in place of immediate accountability.

Context sharpens the subtext. Shevardnadze governed Georgia through the turbulent post-Soviet 1990s, when institutions were brittle, salaries went unpaid, and access to basic services frequently ran through bribes. In that environment, corruption wasn't just theft; it was governance by other means. "Eliminate the foundations" is the most consequential clause because it implies structural reform: credible courts, paid civil servants, transparent procurement, functioning police, competitive markets. It also quietly admits the scale of the task. Foundations are not removed with speeches or arrests; they're rebuilt, often at the expense of the very networks that keep a leader in power.