Reformer Turned Master Diplomat : Shevardnadze: He sided with Gorbachev on reform and changed the ‘dead-end policy’ in superpower relations.

Strolling along a Black Sea beach with Mikhail S. Gorbachev more than five years ago, Eduard Amvrosievich Shevardnadze spoke the fateful words that helped unleash a new revolution in the Soviet Union.

“Everything is rotten,” he said, according to Gorbachev’s recollections in a speech last month.

The two friends concluded that “we can no longer live like this.”

That March, Gorbachev ascended to the leadership of the Communist Party, and within four months he made the charming pragmatist from the southern republic of Georgia his foreign minister.

On Thursday, Shevardnadze announced his resignation as a desperate gesture to save the reforms he helped conceive, ending five years as an acclaimed master diplomat and adding a surprise twist to a life story that already abounded in dramatic tales of political risk, crime-fighting and daring reform.

Shevardnadze, 62, was born in the village of Mamati in southwest Georgia. A schoolteacher’s son, he spent his young adult years as an official of the Communist Youth League, through which he first met Gorbachev in the late 1950s.

From 1965 to 1972 he was Georgia’s top policeman, waging tough campaigns against corruption that ended in a successful battle against the republic’s party chief, whose post Shevardnadze then took over.

As Georgia’s party leader, he was known as an innovator who experimented with limited private enterprise, but he had tried nothing as radical as the reforms of perestroika, and he had virtually no experience in international affairs when he became foreign minister.

But he proved to be a fast study and an indefatigable worker, bringing new spirit to a Foreign Ministry that had ossified during the 27-year reign of Andrei A. Gromyko.

“Shevardnadze was resolute enough to break the longstanding traditions of absolutely dead-end policy” in superpower relations, Georgy A. Arbatov, longtime head of the prestigious U.S.A.-Canada Institute, said.

“In the foreign policy of which Gorbachev is the epicenter, Shevardnadze has been a brilliant helper,” Gennady I. Yanaev, the Communist Party’s secretary for foreign affairs, told the Congress of People’s Deputies.

In an interview with the Communist Party newspaper Pravda last summer, Shevardnadze said that of all his foreign policy achievements, he was “happiest that we signed the Geneva accords and returned our boys from the Afghanistan war without loss of face for our country.”

The foreign minister’s infectious grin, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly shock of white hair became nightly fare on the television news as he circled the globe.

His accented Russian and tendency to mumble added to an impression of retiring charm that helped make him one of the most popular of Soviet politicians.

As perestroika progressed and the division between reformers and hard-liners in the leadership became ever clearer, Shevardnadze aligned himself with Gorbachev and Alexander N. Yakovlev on the left.

Last February, he even wrangled openly with Yegor K. Ligachev, then considered the leader of the Communist Party Old Guard, over Ligachev’s decision almost a year earlier to send troops against protesters in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.