The final curtain

As William Hague steps down as Foreign Secretary (while retaining the honorific First Secretary of State), probably the best Foreign Secretary since Malcolm Rifkind, if not Douglas Hurd (Blair's Foreign Secretaries were emasculated by Downing Street's 'Sofa Government' and the less said about David Miliband's tenure, the better), it is time to remember Eduard Shevardnadze who died last week.  Mikhail Gorbachev's Foreign Secretary from 1985 to 1991, mirroring the length of his office of his boss, the wily Georgian Shevardnadze coined the USSR's foreign policy - as the Cold War was wound down - towards it's Eastern European satellites as the 'Sinatra Doctrine', meaning each former client could conduct their governments how they saw fit i.e. 'My Way'.
Of course, the implication was that the 'Little Stalins' were on their own, the Sinatra Doctrine replacing the Brezhnev Doctrine of intervention slapping down divergent paths of communism, as was the case with crushing the Prague Spring in 1968.  Furthermore, it was doctrine resulting from weakness - as the USSR disintegrated from a mixture of its own internal contradictions and Gorbachev's reforms, it withdrew many (though not all) of its troops to save money, with the military budget reaching a third of total GDP (unsustainable in the long-term). 
It could be argued that Brezhnev Doctrine also demonstrated weakness, not in the military hold that the USSR exercised, but in the whole concept of state-sponsored Marxist-Leninism (the rubbish spouted by the Czechoslovak leadership before the invasion to mollify the Warsaw Pact, affirming unshakable fidelity to proletarian internationalism and declared an implacable struggle against 'bourgeois' ideology and all 'anti-socialist' forces, is parodic).  That it endured only in the medium-term is proof of that.  Yet the Sinatra Doctrine reactivated the centrifugal forces of the Soviet Union itself - if the client states could do it their way, why not the constituent republics under Moscow's direct aegis?
When the USSR ceased to exist officially on Christmas Day 1991, so did Shevardnadze's position as Foreign Secretary - it could not be otherwise.  But he reinvented himself as the saviour of Georgia, as the breakaway republic became subject to its own internal separatist tendencies from Adzharia (Adjara), Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  Content to rule a de facto truncated domain, turning a blind eye to the domestic affairs in each of these regions, Shevardnadze staggered on as president, surviving numerous assassination attempts and generally ruling in an authoritarian manner (Stalin is still regarded as a national hero), corrupt elections securing his power.  This boiled over in 2003 when blatant vote-rigging for parliamentary elections provoked the Rose Revolution, the first of the Colour Revolutions of the 21st century so beloved of the Bush the Younger administration (Professor Richard Sakwa characterises Serbia as the first 'colour revolution' in 2000, but the opposition never adopted a colour and followed similar policies as occurred in Bulgaria in 1997, Slovakia in 1998 and Croatia in 2000).  Shevardnadze narrowly escape the storming of parliament and was finished as a political force in Georgia.
The Sinatra Doctrine, whatever the underlying motivations, was a liberalising force in conjunction with Glasnost and Perestroika at home - it allowed a wide swathe of democratisation to emerge across Eastern Europe, thereafter guaranteeing civil society no matter the gripes about individual politicians.  Shevardnadze's second act in high office, as president of Georgia, was very ignominious though and a sad end to his career, both for himself and the small Caucasus state.