Someone Needs A Copy Editor

Mr. Saakashvili took office in 2004 after spearheading the so-called Rose Revolution, which ousted a government with Soviet ties [bold mine-DL]. ~The New York Times

One could dismiss this as laziness or a case of clumsy phrasing, but considering how eager so many people in the West have been to portray contemporary Russia as a neo-Soviet empire it is worse than the average blunder. Shevardnadze had been foreign minister for the USSR among other things, so he had a history in Soviet government, but it was obviously impossible for the government of independent Georgia in 2003 or at any time since 1991 to have Soviet ties when there was no USSR to which it could have been tied. It’s not that important, I suppose, but when Georgian and Russian politics are as poorly understood in the West as they usually are every misrepresentation makes things a little worse.