Early Life and Career
Zhvania was born in Tbilisi to a Georgian father and a mother of mixed Jewish-Armenian ancestry. In 1985 he graduated from the Faculty of Biology of the Tbilisi Ivane Javakhishvili State University. He worked at the university through 1992.
Zhvania entered national politics in 1988. Between 1988 and 1990, Georgia's Green Party, which Zhvania co-chaired, was one of a number of opposition groups that took part in the country's drive to regain its independence. In September 1991 his party joined the opposition to the government of the first post-Soviet President of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Gamsakhurdia's violent overthrow in January 1992 resulted in Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, coming to power a few months later.
Shevardnadze established the Union of Citizens of Georgia to provide a moderate centre-right grouping for reformist democrats. Zhvania joined the UGC in 1992, entering the Georgian parliament in the same year, and recruited other reformists to the party, notably Mikheil Saakashvili. In 1993, Zhvania became general secretary of Shevardnadze's party. On 25 November 1995, after the party’s victory at the election, he was elected as chairman of the Georgian parliament.
However, Zhvania fell out with Shevardnadze over a corruption scandal and resigned as speaker on 1 November 2001. He and Saakashvili also left Shevardnadze's party. In 2002, he established and chaired a new party, called the United Democrats.
Zhvania had a wife and three children, and in addition to his native Georgian, he spoke Armenian, English, German, and Russian. Zurab Zhvania is the only Georgian Prime Minister to have died while in office.
Read more about this topic: Zurab Zhvania
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Three early risings make an extra day.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)