Leadership Quote by Eduard Shevardnadze

Power is being smuggled in as credential, almost offhandedly. “I was a member of the Politburo for seven years, a foreign minister” reads like a resume line, but in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet world, a resume is a political weapon: it signals proximity to the system’s most sealed room, then dares the listener to deny the authority that proximity confers.

Shevardnadze isn’t just stating where he worked. He’s staking a claim to insider knowledge of how decisions were actually made - the backroom logics, the informal hierarchies, the ritualized language that disguised coercion as consensus. “Politburo” is shorthand for a governing style that treated transparency as weakness; “foreign minister” adds the outward-facing theater of diplomacy, where you learn to speak in calibrated ambiguity and to read what’s not being said. The subtext is: I’ve been in the chair when history was negotiated, and I know which stories are convenient fictions.

Context does the heavy lifting. Shevardnadze was Gorbachev’s foreign minister during perestroika, then later the post-Soviet fixer in Georgia - a man who could sell reform to the West while managing the aftershocks of empire at home. So the line also carries a defensive edge: don’t reduce me to a provincial politician; I’ve operated at the empire’s nerve center. Yet there’s an accidental self-indictment in the minimalism. The sentence offers no moral accounting, only tenure. In a culture where legitimacy often comes from having survived the machine, the blunt credential is both explanation and alibi.