Stepanov-Mamaladze, T. G.

Biographical/Historical Note

Teimuraz G. Stepanov-Mamaladze was born in 1934 in Tbilisi (Georgia). After graduating from the Moscow State University Law School in 1958, he began his career as a journalist in Georgia. In 1978 he was appointed director of the Georgian Information Agency (Gruzinform). At that time he met Eduard Shevardnadze, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia. In 1985, when Shevardnadze was appointed minister of foreign affairs of the Soviet Union and left for Moscow, he invited Stepanov-Mamaladze to work as his aide and speechwriter, which he did through 1991.

In that capacity Stepanov-Mamaladze traveled extensively on various diplomatic missions, including the summit meeting between Gorbachev and Reagan in Reykjavik (1985), talks on the intermediate range nuclear forces treaty (INF) in 1987, and arrangements surrounding the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He witnessed the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in Germany, the "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia, and the overthrow of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania in 1989. Stepanov-Mamaladze also accompanied Shevardnadze during negotiations with Saddam Hussein on the brink of the first Gulf War, when the Soviet Union tried to give the Iraqi leader the opportunity to leave Kuwait honorably in 1991, and was at Shevardnadze's side during meetings of the UN General Assembly from 1986 to 1989.

Stepanov-Mamaladze sat next to Shevardnadze when the latter met with Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George Shultz, James Baker, Ayatollah Khomeini (who had met with only two foreign diplomats - Eduard Shevardnadze and Yasser Arafat), and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, to name just a few.

After Shevardnadze retired from his position as minister of foreign affairs (1991) and was elected to the presidency of the Republic of Georgia in 1992, Stepanov-Mamaladze became his assistant.

In 1994 Stepanov-Mamaladze decided to resume his work as a journalist. He returned to Moscow, where he wrote for Komsomol'skaia pravda, Izvestiia, and Novye izvestiia newspapers. He became the head of the Novye Izvestiia Agency board of directors and a member of the Consultative Council of the Pro et Contra magazine under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation.

He died in 1999 in Moscow and was buried, according to his wishes, in Tbilisi.