Politics & Power Quote by Eduard Shevardnadze

“Realistic” sounds like a bland self-help adjective until you remember who’s saying it: Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister who helped manage the USSR’s controlled retreat from empire, then the Georgian leader tasked with building a state out of wreckage. In that light, the line reads less like a personality trait and more like a survival doctrine.

The intent is disciplinary. Shevardnadze isn’t praising imagination; he’s warning against the intoxicating politics of maximal demands - nationalist fantasies, revolutionary purity tests, grand promises to a public in pain. For a politician who watched an empire dissolve and then tried to keep a fragile country intact, “realistic” doubles as a veto: no romantic timelines, no heroic shortcuts, no pretending that history can be bullied into obedience.

The subtext is also self-protective. “Realism” can be moral clarity, but it’s also an alibi. Leaders invoke realism to justify compromises that look like capitulation, to normalize austerity, to trade ideals for stability and call it maturity. Shevardnadze’s career invites both readings: he was praised for pragmatism abroad and criticized at home for corruption and stalled reforms. The word lets him claim the high ground of responsibility while sidestepping the messy question of responsibility to whom.

Context matters because post-Soviet politics punished dreamers and cynics alike. In a landscape of collapsing institutions, external pressure, and internal factionalism, realism becomes not just a style of governance but a rhetorical shield: a way to tell citizens, and rivals, that the limits are non-negotiable - even if the choices behind those limits are.