Shevardnadze’s Diplomatic Passport
The Diplomatic Passport of a President Who Helped End the Cold War
I’ve had this website online for sixteen years now, and readers offer me documents more often than you’d think. But the email that landed in my inbox a while back was one of the genuinely exciting ones: someone was holding the Georgian diplomatic passport of Eduard Shevardnadze.
The Man Behind the Passport: Georgia’s Last Soviet Foreign Minister
Eduard Shevardnadze served as the final Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, holding the post from 1985 to 1990 before returning briefly in 1991 as the USSR dissolved around him. Before that, he’d already spent over a decade as the de facto leader of Georgia, serving as First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party from 1972 to 1985. In 1992, after president Zviad Gamsakhurdia resigned, Shevardnadze stepped into the vacuum as Chairman of Parliament. By 1995, he’d been formally elected the second President of Georgia, a post he held until the Rose Revolution forced his resignation in 2003.
That’s a career spanning four decades and two collapsed political systems, and this passport was minted right in the middle of it.
Architect of a Vanishing Cold War
Shevardnadze was, alongside Gorbachev, the man most responsible for negotiating the Soviet Union’s exit from the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev appointed him Foreign Minister in 1985, and from that chair Shevardnadze became the public face of Perestroika to the outside world. Only Gorbachev outranked him in shaping Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev Era.
He negotiated nuclear arms treaties with the United States, helped end the Soviet war in Afghanistan, permitted the reunification of Germany, and pulled Soviet forces back from Eastern Europe and the Chinese border. It’s the kind of resume that earned him the nickname “The Silver Fox,” and it’s also exactly the sort of career that produces a diplomatic passport worth tracking down. Shevardnadze played a central role in the détente that ultimately brought the Cold War to a close.
From Kremlin to Tbilisi: Becoming Georgia’s President
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Shevardnadze didn’t retire, he went home and took charge. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he returned to a newly independent Georgia and became head of state after the removal of Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He was formally elected president in 1995, and his presidency carried both the weight of statesmanship and the baggage of rampant corruption and nepotism allegations that dogged his administration for years.
A Revolution of Roses and a Quiet Exit
Shevardnadze’s presidency ended the way many long tenures do: with the public running out of patience. Allegations of electoral fraud during the 2003 legislative election triggered a wave of protests that became known as the Rose Revolution, and Shevardnadze was ultimately forced to resign. He spent his remaining years quietly at his residence on the outskirts of Tbilisi, publishing his memoirs and gradually withdrawing from public life as his health declined. He died on 7 July 2014, at the age of 86, after a long illness.
The Funeral of a Statesman
Shevardnadze’s death drew condolences from the very people who had negotiated the Cold War’s end alongside him. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry credited him with playing an instrumental role in ending the Cold War, easing the risk of nuclear confrontation as Soviet Foreign Minister, and safeguarding Georgia’s sovereignty during the turbulent 1990s. He was given a state funeral on 13 July 2014, attended by Georgian political leaders and foreign dignitaries including former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. After a service at the Holy Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi, he was laid to rest beside his late wife, Nanuli Shevardnadze, at the Krtsanisi residence.
Inside Passport No. 0009137
Georgia Diplomatic Passport issued in 1998, passport no#0009137, 44 pages and full of visas and stamps. Including a USA Diplomatic visa from 1999 as “President of the Republic of Georgia.” The condition is excellent, with typical use for a frequent traveler, and complete.
This is a Georgian diplomatic passport issued in 1998, numbered 0009137, running 44 pages deep and packed with visas and entry stamps from a genuinely well-traveled diplomatic career. Among the stamps is a U.S. diplomatic visa from 1999, issued to Shevardnadze explicitly as “President of the Republic of Georgia.” The condition is excellent: honest wear consistent with frequent international travel, and the document is complete, cover to cover.
For a collector of diplomatic and presidential material, that combination of completeness, an intact visa history, and a subject of this historical stature is genuinely rare. Most diplomatic passports that survive do so precisely because they were retired quietly into a drawer rather than used hard, and this one was clearly used hard.
How a Presidential Passport Found Its Way to Me
According to the owner, Sergey, acquiring the passport came through a relative, and he took the unusual step of contacting Shevardnadze’s family directly to ask whether they were comfortable with him holding it. As Sergey put it to me, Georgia is a small country, and more or less everybody knows everyone, so it felt only fair to ask the family for their blessing. The family was at ease with it and had no interest in reclaiming the document.
What sits in front of me, then, is more than ink and paper. It’s a physical artifact from the final years of the Cold War, carried by one of the two men most responsible for ending it, and later by a president navigating his own country’s turbulent first decade of independence. Together with Gorbachev, Shevardnadze helped bring down the Berlin Wall and reunify Germany, and this passport rode along for a good part of that journey and well beyond it.
ℹ️ This outstanding passport is for sale!
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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