Aleksandre Chikvaidze (; 19 January 1932 – 2012) was a Soviet and Georgian statesman and diplomat. Chikvaidze was appointed Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of independent Georgia by Acting Prime Minister Tengiz Sigua in February 1992 and went on to serve in Eduard Shevardnadze's government, after the latter's return to Georgia in March 1992, until December 1995.
During his tenure as foreign minister, Chikvaidze ushered Georgia into the United Nations as its 179th member, on 31 July 1992, and managed a wave of diplomatic recognition of Georgia, the establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations between Georgia and the countries of the world, and of the integration of Georgia into most international organizations. Chikvaidze undertook strenuous efforts to place the problems of Georgia's internal conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, that were raging at the time, on the international agenda, of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Council of Europe and to have the United Nations Security Council ‘seized of the matter,’ while working closely with the Russian government to keep it engaged in helping Georgia find a solution to these conflicts. Chikvaidze opened Georgia's relationship with NATO by signing the Partnership for Peace Framework Document in March 1994. After leaving the foreign minister post, Chikvaidze served as Georgian ambassador to Greece, to the Holy See, to Switzerland and as Permanent Representative of Georgia to the United Nations Office at Geneva, from 1996 to 2005. He retired from active diplomatic service in June 2005, almost two years into the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili.
Early life and family
Chikvaidze was born on 19 January 1932, in Tbilisi, the capital of what was then the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. He was the only child of Tamar Chikvaidze (née Kobiashvili), an economist and David Chikvaidze, a highly regarded performer of Georgian national choreography, in later years, serving as deputy director of the Georgian philharmonic.
Chikvaidze's family was quite prestigious; his great uncle, Kalistrate Chikvaidze, was a well-known lawyer, political figure and philanthropist in Georgia's second largest city Kutaisi at the turn of the twentieth century. His maternal grandmother, Barbara Kobiashvili, and his maternal grandfather Joseph Kobiashvili, a judge whose honesty was reputed, were both graduates of St. Petersburg University, and played a huge role in his early education. Chikvaidze never knew his paternal grandfather Aleksandre, whom he was named after. As a senior member of the government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia during the country's brief period of independence in 1918–1921, he was persecuted by the new communist authorities and emigrated to France, where he died in 1937 without ever seeing his wife and two sons again.
Chikvaidze's family was of very modest means, despite which, his parents tightened their proverbial belts in order to have him take private lessons in English and in music, an unheard of luxury in the bleak days of the Second World War in the Soviet Union. In 1956, Chikvaidze married Zaira Mshvenieradze, a hydroelectric engineer, who loves literature, the movies, and speaks English and French. They had two sons, David (b. 1958) and Alexander (1963-2006), two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Education
Chikvaidze graduated with honours from Tbilisi Secondary School No. 1 and went on to study law at Moscow State University, graduating in 1955 together with his classmate Mikhail Gorbachev. In the 1960s, he studied English at the Tbilisi Foreign Languages Institute, French at the Alliance française in Mumbai, India, and, in the 1980s, while ambassador at the Hague, also learned Dutch. Chikvaidze earned an advanced degree in history at the Moscow State Academy of Social Sciences in 1966. He earned a full doctorate in 1976 at Tbilisi State University and published his dissertation as a book “The British Cabinet on the Eve of the Second World War”, which he had based on the just declassified in 1969 archives of the Foreign Office in the pre-war years. In 1978, he took a special two-year international relations course for senior government officials at the Soviet Diplomatic Academy, graduating within one year and, in 1979, was named the Soviet Consul General in San Francisco.