Gorbachev Fails to Talk Shevardnadze Out of Resigning : Soviet Union: But a top Kremlin adviser says the departing foreign minister may move to another leadership post on the president’s ‘team.’

With world leaders worried about the future of Soviet foreign policy and domestic politics abuzz with confused speculation, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev met on Friday with Eduard A. Shevardnadze for a two-hour talk that failed to persuade the foreign minister to withdraw his bombshell resignation.

But a close Gorbachev adviser said he believed that Shevardnadze, who announced his resignation Thursday as a protest against what he termed the country’s encroaching “dictatorship,” could still move to another leadership post.

“I am sure Shevardnadze will stay on Gorbachev’s team,” Georgy K. Shakhnazarov, a political scientist who advises Gorbachev on domestic reforms, told the official news agency Tass.

Shevardnadze’s future and the real motives behind his resignation dominated gossip in the marble halls of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament, on Friday, with theories of Byzantine political machinations abounding and few people willing to accept the foreign minister’s word that he resigned in outrage at criticism from reactionaries.

“Either Gorbachev pushed him into it, or Gorbachev let him know he was prepared to sacrifice him, or this is all just some maneuver,” Leningrad Deputy Yuri Boldyrev speculated. “I’m still trying to understand it.”

Vitaly N. Ignatenko, Gorbachev’s spokesman, appeared in the Congress’ lobby on a mission of reassurance in the late afternoon to tell reporters that the Soviet president and Shevardnadze had just met for a long talk, mainly on day-to-day foreign affairs, including the crisis in the Persian Gulf.

Asked if Shevardnadze had changed his mind about leaving, Ignatenko said, “Everything remains as it was in his speech, but he is continuing to fulfill his functions.”

As for the concern expressed by Western leaders and political scientists that Shevardnadze’s resignation heralds a turn for the worse, at home and in foreign policy, Ignatenko said: “Gorbachev will study the reaction from abroad with the calmness characteristic of him.”

And in a move calculated to signal that the Soviet Union’s foreign policy remained unchanged, despite Shevardnadze’s resignation, Gorbachev sent a message to the Gulf Cooperation Council reaffirming Moscow’s support for the U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait.

“I would like to confirm the determination of the Soviet Union to stand by international law and achieve restoration of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kuwait,” said the message, carried by Tass.

Beyond a printed appeal signed by 22 reformist deputies for a broad coalition of democratic forces, Shevardnadze’s stunning gesture did not immediately have the effect that he said he wanted--persuading liberals who had “run away into the bushes” to stand and fight the government’s shift toward the reactionary right.

But his warnings of dictatorship brought a powerful response, with several speakers at the Congress carrying them even further.

Anatoly A. Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad, predicted that, if the economy continued to disintegrate, then within months, “All of us, democrats, radicals and conservatives, will come scraping and bowing to the military and say ‘Come and rule us.’ ”

Vladimir K. Chernyak, a deputy from the Ukraine, said: “Gorbachev himself stands at the center of the coup, even if he doesn’t realize it. By demanding more and more powers for himself, he’s creating the legal foundations for a dictatorship--possibly not for himself.”

The warnings came as the Congress began to address key constitutional amendments that Gorbachev has proposed to increase his presidential powers, replacing the overgrown Council of Ministers with a Cabinet directly subordinate to him and adding the post of vice president.

Several Congress deputies and observers from Georgia, Shevardnadze’s home republic, said they believe it was the issue of the vice presidency that prompted the foreign minister’s decision.

Gorbachev disclosed Thursday that he had planned to nominate Shevardnadze as his No. 2 in command.

In fact, said Klara Abramiya, correspondent for the state-run Georgian Republic newspaper, “Gorbachev betrayed him” by planning to make Shevardnadze take on, with the vice presidency, the dirtiest of the country’s work--suppressing separatist movements in the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics in a last-ditch attempt to keep the country together.

“They wanted to do everything through his hands. And he’d never agree to sending the army into Tbilisi,” she said, referring to the Georgian capital.

Abramiya predicted Shevardnadze “will never return” to the post that won him worldwide acclaim over five years of revolutionizing Soviet foreign policy.

Tass quoted a similar analysis from “a formerly prominent Soviet diplomat” it did not identify.

“Shevardnadze was definitely aware that the post of vice president was being reserved for him, and not wishing to assume unpopular domestic responsibilities, which he could not avoid in such a post during this critical period of the country’s history, he decided to take a step that would make his election impossible,” the diplomat said.

Other unsubstantiated theories circulating at the Congress held that Shevardnadze wanted to go back to Georgia and help in its nationalist revival; that he simply got carried away with his emotions and would eventually consent to be vice president; that he planned to transfer his loyalties to Russian Federation leader Boris N. Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s political nemesis.

But Shevardnadze offered no further public explanations on Friday. His spokesman, Vitaly I. Churkin, would not discuss the resignation further.

The popular foreign minister’s resignation mystified, but it also reawakened interest in politics among Soviet citizens, who have largely lost faith in Gorbachev’s reforms and become far more interested in finding food.

A newspaper editor from the Black Sea port of Sevastopol said that for the first time in months, he heard passengers on the bus talking about national politics.

“Shevardnadze has shaken everyone,” he said. “This has had a really big resonance. People are even forgetting about the shortage of food.”

Most of the traditional Soviet press tended to bury Shevardnadze’s dramatic speech in the middle of long reports on the Congress.

But the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda bannered its front page with the headline “Is Shevardnadze Leaving?”

And the new Nezavisimaya Gazeta, or Independent Newspaper, featured a grid of photographs of top government officials with a box over the title “foreign minister” filled only by a big, black question mark.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Moscow contributed to this report.