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 and/or career:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)