Leadership Quote by Eduard Shevardnadze

“When I came back to power” lands like a quiet correction to the myth of national self-direction. Shevardnadze frames himself less as a partisan winner than as a returning technician, summoned to fix a state that had slipped the diplomatic leash. The phrase carries the faintest echo of inevitability: he didn’t merely win office; history called him back.

The real payload is “completely isolated.” It’s a dire diagnosis, but also a subtle alibi. In the early 1990s, Georgia was reeling from civil conflict, separatist wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, economic collapse, and the whiplash of post-Soviet independence. By casting the country as “isolated on the international stage,” Shevardnadze shifts the story away from internal political failures and toward external abandonment. Isolation becomes both the consequence of chaos and the justification for strong-handed consolidation: you can’t stabilize a state, the line implies, without first making it legible to Washington, Moscow, Brussels.

There’s a second layer of positioning. Shevardnadze wasn’t just any Georgian politician; he was the former Soviet foreign minister who helped end the Cold War. Invoking “the international stage” is self-portraiture in policy language. His authority comes from access, recognition, and fluency in the rituals of global legitimacy. The subtext is transactional: bring me back, and Georgia gets back into the room where outcomes are decided.

It’s also a warning. A small country’s sovereignty can be eroded not only by invasion, but by irrelevance. For Shevardnadze, isolation isn’t merely loneliness; it’s vulnerability.