In Communist Strongholds, Voters Doubt That They Can Bring Change : Soviet Union: Candidates struggle to spark interest in Sunday’s Russian republic election. But in places where party politics run deep, reforms are viewed with distrust.

Russian moviegoers primed for entertainment on a blustery winter evening this week were fidgeting in their seats and waiting for the delayed start of an adventure film when a lone man in suit and tie walked onto the theater’s dimly lit stage.

To the surprised audience, candidate Valery I. Ikonnikov began expounding his platform for economic and political change. But the 700 people in the audience were in no mood for a lecture.

Mothers tried halfheartedly, and largely in vain, to hush their giggling children.

“Independence from Moscow!” a man called out from the back of the theater, apropos of nothing, then returned to the private conversation he was having with the woman next to him.

Virtually on the eve of Sunday’s election for parliament in the Russian Republic, voter apathy is evident in this sprawling industrial center of a million people about 600 miles southeast of Moscow.

The apathy, more widespread than President Mikhail S. Gorbachev would like to admit, stems from a firm conviction that in most places there is no real alternative yet to the Communist Party, and that the party’s most outspoken reform-minded politicians will eventually let the people down.

Nevertheless, for Ikonnikov, a 51-year-old economist, the seven minutes he spent in the theater trying to get the audience’s attention were far more useful than the 90-minute meeting he hurried to from the theater. This was an organized meet-your-candidate program, and it was attended by only six voters.

“In the theater I must overcome the resistance of the audience,” he said later in an interview, “but at least I get a chance to speak to 700 people, and maybe they will remember my name. It is best to surprise them. If you try to arrange a planned meeting with voters, few attend. People here don’t believe anymore in politics or politicians.”

Ikonnikov, a Communist, is running against four other candidates for a seat in the regional parliament.

Volgograd, like many other cities in the Russian heartland, is a stronghold of conservatism, riddled with distrust of what are perceived as newfangled ideas. Gorbachev is sure to face real and lasting problems in winning acceptance here for many of his reforms, and some analysts warn that his programs may falter due to entrenched resistance in communities like this one.

The city was the site of 200 days of fighting between the Soviet and German armies in World War II, and it was all but destroyed. In those days it was called Stalingrad, and in the last year or so some people have called for restoring the old name.

People here say that Gorbachev may promise that times are changing, and that maybe some other people believe it in the once-repressed republics now tasting new freedoms. But here all they see are the same type of leaders, a lot of talk, endless food shortages, long waits for housing, and disruptions in water and gas supplies.

Ironically, while Gorbachev is taking steps to diminish the power of the Communist Party all across the Soviet Union, here and in other distant places almost everything is still dependent on the party organization.

“There is great skepticism about whether things can ever really change, no matter what anyone says,” Valery Konovolov, a senior editor of the newspaper Volgogradskaya Pravda, said in a recent interview.

Traditionally, party members have been given the best jobs, the best education, the opportunity to travel abroad, to go to the theater, sometimes even to read books forbidden to the general public. Even today it is the party members who are the smooth speakers, who seem to have polish, glamour and some link to real power.

But the party leaders, even those with Gorbachev’s personal seal of approval, are still playing by the old rules, rules that ignore the common people, Volgograders say. A case in point, they say, is Vladimir Kalashnikov.

Kalashnikov was the city’s leader until January, when he was forced to resign along with 14 other Volgograd party leaders accused of corruption and mismanagement. He was a Gorbachev protege, once heralded as a rising star of perestroika , Gorbachev’s program to restructure the Soviet society. Now he is hospitalized in Moscow, suffering, party officials say, from a disorder brought on by stress and nerves.

His downfall was the result of several rather typical sins. Like many other local party officials, he provided a relative and several close friends with apartments without requiring that they wait the necessary three to five years.

“I have certain privileges,” he said, without embarrassment, in an interview with the Moscow magazine Ogonyok.

He angered many people when, in an attempt to modernize, he introduced a new irrigation system that was widely distrusted by old-timers. It led to massive soil erosion in farming areas.

And in what has come to be known as Kalashnikov’s “anti-tomato campaign,” he made a misguided effort to clamp down on speculators by ordering the destruction of garden plots where factory workers and retired people raised vegetables to sell in local markets. This resulted not only in the loss of much-needed income for Volgograders; vegetables had to be brought in from other regions, sending prices up sharply.

Kalashnikov resigned after Ogonyok published an account of his misdeeds.

“It is too bad about Kalashnikov,” candidate Ikonnikov said with a shrug. “He thought he was just doing what party leaders have always done, only a little better. In different circumstances, if he had had better luck, he might eventually have become a Politburo member. And not the worst one, at that.

“But his demise shows the people will no longer allow the party to exist as it is. It must die as the all-powerful, privileged institution if it is to survive at all.”

Volgograd is not like the Baltic republics or some of the other independent-minded regions, where a variety of political parties have sprung up. Here it is still the Communists who are regarded as the only legitimate, if sometimes decadent, power-holders.

There are 141 candidates for the 18 seats allotted to Volgograd in the regional parliament, and of those candidates less than 7% are non-party members.

One is Nikolai A. Beskaravainov, a worker for the last 27 years in a tool-making factory. His approach to meeting voters is mainly to introduce himself as a non-Communist and to remind his audience that the party has messed up the country.

But Beskaravainov, reed-thin and looking older than his 46 years, talks hurriedly from notes and without the confidence that voters are used to seeing in party officials.

In an appearance this week at Volgograd State University, some in the largely inattentive audience appeared to have trouble taking him seriously.

“Do you consider yourself to be a politician?” one student asked.

In an interview later, Beskaravainov reflected on the problems he has faced in the campaign.

“Unlike most of the party members,” he said, “I don’t have a telephone at home to use to recruit support. I don’t have a private car. And I don’t have the party machine behind me. The manager of the plant where I have worked all my life refused to give me his backing because I wasn’t a party member and because the plant’s party committee opposed me.

“I know that sometimes I don’t reach the voters, because I can’t express myself properly on the podium. I haven’t had years of practice. Still, I hope to be elected. There is a real distrust of the party, and maybe that will work in my favor.”

Many Volgograders seem to have the same attitude as Nikolai D. Fomenko, a lifelong resident who says he last tried to vote 10 years ago, after work and just before the polls closed.

“The registrar looked at the records and said my name had been crossed out, indicating I’d already voted,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘So that’s how it is.’ And that is the last time I ever tried to vote.”

Fomenko is not eager to change this. He said he does not know the names of the candidates in his district.

“They are all the same, aren’t they?” he asked rhetorically. “In fact everything, in Volgograd at least, is pretty much the same.”