Shevardnadze Resigns : Gorbachev Says He’s ‘Stunned’

Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze resigned without warning today, telling Parliament that a reactionary resurgence threatened the Soviet Union with dictatorship. President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said he was stunned by the resignation of his longtime ally.

“Dictatorship is coming,” Shevardnadze told the Parliament, his voice choked with emotion. “No one knows what kind of dictatorship it will be, what kind of dictator will come, and what order things will take.

“If you make a dictatorship, no one can say who will become the dictator.”

Hard-liners have been pushing Gorbachev to declare a state of emergency in troubled areas of the country, and he is asking the Congress of People’s Deputies legislature to amend the constitution to further strengthen his power.

Gorbachev took the podium hours later and said that before the resignation he had planned to make Shevardnadze his vice president, under a government reorganization that would put more power under presidential control. He did not say whether he is still considering Shevardnadze for the job.

Speaking slowly and calmly, Gorbachev said: “I don’t want either to simplify the situation or over-dramatize it. The main thing is not to fall into panic or, even worse, hysteria.”

“I personally condemn” Shevardnadze for abandoning the perestroika reform program during a difficult time, the Soviet president said.

Gorbachev said he knew nothing about any attempt to establish a dictatorship but told deputies that such a condition could arise if the country continues to sink into disorder.

Immediately after Gorbachev spoke, parliamentarians voted 1,540 to 52, with 11 abstentions, to ask Shevardnadze to stay in the job. But Foreign Ministry spokesman Vitaly Churkin said the resignation was “irreversible.”

There was immediate speculation that Deputy Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, an Arab specialist who has been Gorbachev’s personal envoy to the Persian Gulf, is a possible successor.

Shevardnadze, waving his finger at lawmakers, blamed what he called reactionary forces for pushing the president to take dictatorial steps but he also implied that Gorbachev is acceding to their demands.

The white-haired Georgian and second most visible figure in Soviet politics decried the influence of hard-line lawmakers “with colonels’ shoulder-stripes” in the Congress, the country’s highest legislative body.

“I express my great gratitude to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev,” he said. “I am his friend. I think as he does, I have always supported and will until my last day support the ideas of perestroika, the idea of renewal, the ideas of democratization.”

“But I think that resignation is my duty as a person, a citizen, a Communist,” he said, declaring that “the future belongs to democracy and freedom.”

Shevardnadze, 62, was named foreign minister four months after Gorbachev became Communist Party chief in March, 1985. He helped steer Soviet foreign policy away from confrontation and conquest in favor of appeasement and coexistence.