On July 7, Eduard Shevardnadze, foreign minister to Mikhail Gorbachev and a driving force behind the perestroika era in Russia, died in his native Georgia at the age of 86.
In June 1985, Shevardnadze—then a lifelong Communist official with no diplomatic experience—was reportedly taken aback when his old friend Gorbachev asked him to take charge of the USSR’s foreign policy, the New York Times reports.

Working together, the two men overhauled Soviet foreign policy—pulling the USSR back from its calamitous war in Afghanistan, negotiating nuclear arms treaties with the United States, permitting the reunification of Germany, and opening up discussions of human rights issues.