As a human-rights activist in the 1970s, he was incarcerated in a Soviet psychiatric ward and his name mentioned as a Nobel Peace Prize candidate. Soon after, he shocked supporters by recanting, on national TV, his entire code of beliefs. More than a decade later, he became Georgia's first freely elected President, only to stun everyone again, this time by forging a brutish dictatorship whose excesses provoked his own violent ouster. Last week, after a 20-month exile in which he fought an unsuccessful war to regain power, Zviad Gamsakhurdia carried out his most baffling flourish yet, shrouding his apparent death in...
In Search of Zviad
Shevardnadze's erratic rival creates his latest mystery
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