Politics & Power Quote by Eduard Shevardnadze

Dependence is the real headline here, and Shevardnadze doesn’t try to prettify it. The sentence is built like a conditional loan agreement: Georgia can be “temporarily” saved, but only “with the help of foreign countries,” because the state has “no other source of financing.” That bluntness is doing political work. It lowers expectations, preemptively distributes blame, and converts a humiliating reality into a sober argument for legitimacy: don’t judge this government by ideological purity or instant results; judge it by whether it can keep the lights on.

The phrasing “under that condition only” is the pressure point. It’s a warning to domestic rivals who might dream of a self-sufficient, romanticized sovereignty, and it’s a signal to international donors that their leverage is acknowledged and welcomed. Shevardnadze frames aid not as charity but as the sole mechanism of stabilization, turning foreign assistance into a kind of emergency oxygen. The word “extricate” is carefully chosen: not “rebuild,” not “transform,” but pull free from an immediate trap. The horizon is short because the crisis is immediate.

Context matters: Shevardnadze returned to a newly independent Georgia in the early 1990s amid economic collapse, armed conflict, and institutional breakdown after the Soviet implosion. A veteran of Soviet diplomacy, he understood how survival could hinge on external recognition, credits, and mediation. The subtext is almost transactional: give us support now, and we can manufacture enough order for politics to resume later. That’s not idealism. It’s triage.