multi-dimensional characters instead of simulating the single stereotype. His breakthrough came in 1830, in his characterization of the fatuous Muscovite nobleman Famusov in Alexander Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit. Six years later, Shchepkin’s rendition of Khlestakov, the petty bureaucrat mistakenly identified by corrupt provincial officials as one of the tsar’s investigators in Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, assured the move toward realism.
His great talent, and popularity on stage, gave him access to Russia’s highest literary circles, where he helped novelist Ivan Turgenev write for the stage. Ironically, though, he surrendered his place at center stage when he refused to modify his style to accommodate the next level of realism, plays written in colloquialisms by Russia’s historically most popular playwright Alexander Ostrovsky from the 1860s. See also: THEATER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Senelick, Laurence. (1984). Serf Actor: The Life and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
(1733-1790), historian, publicist, and government servitor.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov was a scion of one of Russia’s oldest families of the nobility. His father-in- law, Prince Ivan Shcherbatov (1696-1761), was Russian minister to the court of St. James from 1739 to 1742, and from 1743 to1746. Upon retirement from military service in 1762 following Peter III’s Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility, Mkhail Shcherbatov went on to serve as a deputy to Catherine II’s Legislative Commission (1766-1767), and then as Russia’s official historiographer, beginning in 1768.
Shcherbatov is perhaps best known for his publication On the Corruption of Morals in Russia (O Povrezhdenii Nravov v Rossii), in which he criticizes Peter the Great’s introduction of the Table of Ranks (1722). He argued that the rank system reduced the prestige of the old nobility and allowed the rise of a mediocre and materialistic class of servitors. “By the regulations of the military service, which Peter the Great had newly introduced,” he wrote, “the peasants began with their masters at the same stage as soldiers of the rank and file: It was not uncommon for the peasants, by the law of seniority, to reach the grade of officer long before their masters, whom, as their inferiors, they frequently beat with sticks. Noble families were so scattered in the service that often one did not come again in contact with his relatives during his whole lifetime.” Shcherbatov believed in the innate inequality of human beings and genetic superiority of the noble aristocracy. He lamented the decline of the pre-Petrine nobility’s influence during the eighteenth century, because he did not believe one could achieve the genetic superiority of the latter by meritorious service alone. While he did advocate a constitutional form of government, he urged that Russia be ruled by a hereditary monarch, who would be constrained only by a constitution and checked only by a Senate composed of the old nobility with extensive financial, judicial, and executive powers. See also: KULTURNOST; TABLE OF RANKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cross, A. G., and Smith, G. S., eds. (1994). Literature, Lives, and Legality in Catherine’s Russia. Cotgrave, Nottingham, UK: Astra Press.
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(b. 1928), foreign minister coincident with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Eduard Shevardhadze was minister of internal affairs of the Georgian Republic from 1965 to 1972, first secretary of the republic from 1972 to 1985, foreign minister of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1990 and again in 1991, and president of the Republic of Georgia from 1992 onward.
Until 1985, Eduard Shevardnadze’s career had been entirely within the Soviet republic of Georgia. The character traits he brought with him from Georgia would serve him well during his years as foreign minister. He was a man of considerable viAs foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze implemented Gorbachev’s “new thinking” in international relations. ARCHIVE
sion, with a strong sense of purpose. He was also a superb politician-opportunistic, flexible, pragmatic, and ruthless. He was a natural actor, as every great politician must be, and he was a man of action, a problem-solver impatient with obstacles, and a brutal political infighter. Perhaps most important, he was a Georgian with cosmopolitan leanings, not a Russian who distrusted the West.
Shevardnadze used the available instruments of power to advance his career and further his policy objectives in Georgia at the outset of his career. He repressed dissidents and removed real and potential opponents. An outstanding Soviet apparatchik, he acted the role of sycophant to the leaders of the Soviet Union, extolling the virtues of those in a position to help him. But he brought to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow a commitment to radical change, a willingness to implement reform in an unorthodox manner, and the political skills and strength to accomplish his goals.
When Shevardnadze was appointed foreign minister of the Soviet Union in 1985, it was widely assumed that he would be little more than a mouthpiece for Mikhail Gorbachev, who would conduct his own foreign policy. In turning to a regional party leader with no foreign-policy background, however, Gorbachev was relying on personal instinct and political acumen. As party leader in Georgia during the 1970s and early 1980s, Shevardnadze battled corruption and introduced the most liberal political and economic reforms of any Soviet regional leader. Gorbachev’s long association with Shevardnadze was rooted in shared frustration with the inefficiencies and corruption of the communist system, and he believed that his friend had the understanding and political skills necessary to formulate and implement a new foreign policy.
Shevardnadze played a critical role in conceptualizing and implementing the Soviet Union’s dramatic about- face during the 1980s. Considered the moral force behind “new political thinking” in the former Soviet Union, Shevardnadze was the point man in the struggle to undermine the forces of inertia at home and to end Moscow’s isolation abroad. Two U.S. secretaries of state, George Shultz and James Baker, have credited him with convincing them that Moscow was committed to serious negotiations with the United States. Each became a proponent of reconciliation in administrations that were intensely anti-Soviet; each concluded that the history of Soviet-U.S. relations and the end of the Cold War would have been far different had it not been for Shevardnadze.
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Commitment to the nonuse of force became Shevardnadze’s most important contribution to the end of communism and the Cold War, permitting the virtually nonviolent demise of the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union itself. Shevardnadze was more adamant on this issue than was Gorbachev; he opposed the use of force in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989 and in the Baltics in 1990. Shevardnadze recognized from his Georgian experience that the use of force against non-Russian minorities would be counterproductive, and particularly opposed Gorbachev’s reliance on the military. Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister because of Gorbachev’s turn to the political right wing and, during his resignation speech in December 1990, he predicted that the use of force would undermine perestroika. The violence in Lithuania and Latvia three weeks later, condoned by Gorbachev, proved him right.
When Shevardnadze returned to Georgia, he initially ruled by emergency decree, without the legitimacy of law and with the support of corrupt and brutal paramilitary forces. Finally elected Georgia’s second president in 1995 (and reelected in 2000), he embarked on another campaign to rid Georgia of corruption, reform the economy, and restore political stability.
In 1992 Shevardnadze returned to an independent Georgia that was far worse off than when he had departed for Moscow nearly seven years earlier. His predecessor, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an ultra-nationalist who was both inept and corrupt, used his office to restrict civil liberties and to accumulate great personal wealth. Civil strife was destroying the country, and the economy was in ruins. As the head of the state, Shevardnadze was forced to pursue
