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.

[3] Chikvaidze opened Georgia's relationship with NATO by signing the Partnership for Peace Framework Document in March 1994.

[4] After leaving the foreign minister post, Chikvaidze served as Georgian ambassador to Greece,[5] to the Holy See,[6] to Switzerland and as Permanent Representative of Georgia to the United Nations Office at Geneva, from 1996 to 2005.

[12] 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.

[13] 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.

[14] In 1956, Chikvaidze married Zaira Mshvenieradze, a hydroelectric engineer, who loves literature, the movies, and speaks English and French.

[15] 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.

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.

[17] Following his postgraduate studies at the Soviet Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow in 1964–1966, Chikvaidze briefly returned to Tbilisi to his old job at the central committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, but soon thereafter in 1967, he left with his family for his first posting abroad – his true calling and interest – as vice consul in charge of cultural affairs at the Soviet consulate general in Bombay, India.

[18] In early 1969, for good work and due to the health of his family, Chikvaidze was transferred as First Secretary of the USSR Embassy in London, in charge of cultural affairs and public diplomacy.

[16] In 1973–1977, Chikvaidze served as first secretary of the Tbilisi Ordzhonikidze district committee of the Communist Party and, from 1977 to September 1978 as minister for publishing, polygraphy and book trade of Georgia.

His arrival in San Francisco in September[19] was followed in December by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the final demise of US-Soviet détente that had marked the beginning of the 1970s.

[18] After the dissolution of the Soviet Union as of 1 January 1992, Chikvaidze remained in post and presented his Credentials again to HM Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, this time as Ambassador of the Russian Federation.

The Soviets, on the other hand, won all their final round games against Poland, and many questioned if the Poles had thrown the match.