Eduard Shevardnadze’s Bloody Past

By Michael Ledeen
The Wall Street Journal, 05/13/91

Eduard Shevardnadze’s current visit to the U.S. has been a
triumph. Although formally without office, the former Soviet
foreign minister has met with top administration officials
(including his close friend Secretary of State James Baker)
and congressional leaders, as well as giving advice to new
graduates at Boston University.

Yet despite Mr. Shevardnadze’s claim to be one of the
leaders of the democratic movement in the Soviet Union, there
is a very nasty dark side to his own career. He was, after
all, minister of the Department of the Interior from 1965 to
1972, and thereafter first secretary of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of Georgia. In both capacities, he was
in charge of “anti-corruption campaigns,” which, as students
of Soviet politics know, were purges by another name.

It is not easy to get details of Mr. Shevardnadze’s
efforts in Georgia, but some “samizdat” publications of the
period, as well as several books by Soviet and Georgian
dissidents, contain considerable information. A particularly
detailed account consists of the signed confession of one
Yuri Tsirekidze, convicted in April 1975 of “extensive bodily
injury leading to fatal consequences” (that is, beating a man
to death) and “refusing help to a suffering person.” He
committed these crimes in the Investigatory Detention Center
in Tbilisi, where Mr. Shevardnadze was in charge.

Mr. Tsirekidze’s actions were part of a vast purge carried
out under the supervision of Mr. Shevardnadze: In the two
years preceding Mr. Tsirekidze’s trial, some 25,000 persons
were arrested in Georgia, of whom 9,500 were party members
and another 7,000 of whom came from the Komsomol, the party
youth organization. Here are some excerpts of the confession:

“On orders of the procurator Lezhava and his brother . . .
and on assignment from E. Shevardnadze, I was told, the
object Roman Enukidze was sent to me. He was in a group . . .
of the Bureau of Land for Gardening . . . Lezhava,
Svimonishvili and others promised me that if I handled this
case they would free me, since Shevardnadze himself had given
his word.

“I processed the Object Enukidze. I put all my energy into
it. He had been under observation before. I put him in touch
with his home and convinced him of everything. I made him
confess . . . to the Minister of Internal Affairs of the
Georgian SSR.”

The methods used to extract confessions from these
unfortunate “objects” were the same as usual in Georgia:

“In room 45 Agdgomelashvili (an agent) beat Mikhelashvili
(a Jew) on assignment from Panfilov (chief of operations), in
room 44 agents . . . beat and cut with a razor the object
Datusani, in room 37 agent Usupyan on assignment from
Panfilov and Svimonishvili beat the object Valeri
Kukhianidze, whose internal organs got so beat up he spit
blood, after which he died in the Central Prison Hospital and
was `written off.'”

“. . . In a word, beating went on in all the rooms, and
the groaning and howling of the objects was heard all over
the building . . . . {I}t was a slaughterhouse.”

The author of these damning statements — the unfortunate
Mr. Tsirekidzewas the fall guy for the KGB and Interior
ministry officials who ordered him to carry out his acts of
brutality. And one of those officials, the one who had “given
his word” that Mr. Tsirekidze would go free if he were
vicious enough in interrogation, eventually made it all the
way up the ladder to become foreign minister of the Soviet
Union.

Similar stories, documenting both the general
Shevardnadze-led repression and the extensive use of torture
under his leadership can be found in Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s
Russian-language book on “Torture in Georgia” (1976), in N.
Gougouchvili’s “La Georgie” (1983) and in Ludmila Alexeeva’s
“History of Dissent in the U.S.S.R.,” published in Russian by
the Khronika Press in Vermont in 1984.

Mr. Shevardndze’s actions in those years should come as no
great surprise, given the nature of Soviet politics, and it
is even possible that, having reached the heights, and having
seen the wretched state into which the Soviet Union had
fallen, Mr. Shevardnadze underwent a fundamental conversion
to the values of peace, democracy and the rule of law. But it
behooves us to tell the full story of this powerful and
ambitious man, who has certainly made a contribuion to world
peace, but who also bears responsibility for dreadful acts of
brutality on a vast scale.

Mr. Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute.