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Eduard Shevardnadze, who has died aged 86, deserves to go down in history as one of the major figures of our age for steering the Soviet Union in from the cold during his five-and-a-half years as Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister, from 1985 onwards. After the end of the Soviet Union, he became the leader of his native Georgia, now an independent country, and took a brave stand. In the autumn of 1993, he stood in the middle of a brutal battle in Sukhumi in an effort to defend Georgia's sovereignty against Abkhazian separatists. However, his good name was later tarnished amid allegations of corruption involving him and his family.