Reformers Run Strongly in Soviet Vote : Elections: Early results of regional and local races confirm the growing power of new political movements. Populist Yeltsin wins easily.

Pro-reform candidates, including radical populist Boris N. Yeltsin and several former political prisoners, won strong backing from voters in the Soviet Union’s regional and local elections, according to preliminary results released Monday.

Reformers, both within and outside the Communist Party, appeared to have captured a significant number of seats in voting Sunday for the parliaments of Russia, Byelorussia and the Ukraine, three of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, and on their local government councils.

Although a second round of voting will be required in hundreds of contests, candidates wanting to accelerate the pace of reform and broaden its scope appeared to have secured a significant political victory in the Slavic heartland of the Soviet Union, both official reports and accounts from local sources indicated.

The inclusion of a large number of reformers in the republic parliaments, as well as in many city and regional councils, should bring President Mikhail S. Gorbachev the support that he says perestroika, his program of political and economic restructuring, has needed at lower levels to overcome bureaucratic resistance.

But some of the reformers’ politics are well to the left of Gorbachev, and candidates nominated by nationalists have autonomy, if not independence, as their first priority.

Early reports indicated that party officials generally managed to avoid the embarrassing first-round defeats that many had suffered in last year’s national elections. Still, many have been forced into runoff elections this time. Under Gorbachev, party leaders who lose popular elections are expected to resign their positions.

The elections confirmed the rapid ascendancy of new political movements--such as Democratic Russia and, in the Ukraine, Rukh. They campaigned hard on behalf of the reformers, often against strong Communist Party machines, and brought the republics a step closer to multi-party politics.

Although more than 80% of the candidates were members of the Communist Party, the elections had quickly become contests between conservatives who ran with party backing and liberals who made bolder reform the basis of their pitch to voters. These were the first elections in which voters in the three republics could choose from among candidates of different political movements.

After the recent ouster of nearly 20 regional party leaderships because of mounting popular discontent, particularly over shortages of food and consumer goods as well as the abuse of power, party officials may have done well simply in avoiding defeat.

The large number of candidates, an average of nearly seven for each seat in most constituencies and with more than 20 in some, complicated the election process considerably. As many as 85% of the contests appeared to be inconclusive Monday, according to state television, with no candidate winning more than half the votes cast. These require a runoff between the top two candidates in two weeks.

But activists in many areas took the runoffs as a partial but significant victory and said that the strong showing of opposition candidates in the first round of voting virtually guaranteed many of them victories in the second.

More than 150 million people were registered to vote, and the turnouts Sunday ranged from 64% in Moscow and Leningrad to nearly 90% in some other cities, according to election officials.

Altogether, there were more than 11,000 candidates for 1,800 seats in the three republics’ parliaments, and tens of thousands more candidates sought election to local governing councils. Official results will not be announced until March 14.

Yeltsin, who has become one of Gorbachev’s sharpest and most vocal critics in recent months, won more than 72% of the vote, defeating 11 other candidates, in Sverdlovsk, an industrial center in the Ural Mountains that remains his political base.

“The vote gives the possibility to strengthen reforms and allow new measures to be taken,” Yeltsin said in Amsterdam, where he is promoting his recently published autobiography. “I have been urging Gorbachev to take a whole other tactic for perestroika. The results show I was right. I will advise him to go forward faster, with more strength.”

Yeltsin, who remains a member of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee, had declared before the election that he would seek the presidency of the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union’s largest republic, if elected, challenging Vitaly I. Vorotnikov, a member of the party’s ruling Politburo, who now holds the post.

But Yeltsin told a news conference in Amsterdam on Monday that he would need to assess the number of other reformers elected to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies and the strength of their support before committing himself.

He warned, however, that if the various blocs, including radicals and conservatives, are not given proportional representation in the leadership of the Russian Parliament, he would quit the Communist Party and perhaps start a rival organization.

Dozens of candidates allied with Yeltsin in the Democratic Russia movement, a coalition of reform groups, also won first-round victories.

In Moscow, Sergei Kovalyov, a human rights campaigner and former political prisoner who had worked for years with the late Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel Peace laureate, appeared to have won election to the Russian Parliament. Lev Ponomaryov, another human rights activist, appeared to have won a place in a runoff vote.

Two other prominent winners were Vyacheslav Starkov, editor of the liberal weekly newspaper Argumenty i Facty, and Alexander Politkovsky, a journalist on the avant-garde television program Vzglyad.

Sergei Stankevich, a political scientist who has gained considerable popularity as a member of the national parliament, won election to the Moscow city council. Gavriil Popov, a liberal economist and Parliament member, secured a place in a runoff election for the council. Stankevich, Popov and others want to turn the council into a “liberated zone” and a high-profile base for reform.

Moscow Mayor Valery Saikin and Yuri Prokofiev, the city’s Communist Party leader, were both forced into runoff elections when they failed to get more than half of the votes cast.

In Leningrad, the group Democratic Elections ’90 said its candidates were ahead in 30 of 34 constituencies and were likely to win three-quarters of the seats on local and district councils after campaigns that focused on discontent over living standards in Leningrad.

In the Ukraine, the grass-roots national movement Rukh won most of the seats in the republic’s Parliament from the west but only succeeded in forcing party candidates into runoff elections in the east. Many of the winners received more than 80% of the votes cast.

Ivan Drach, a leading Ukrainian poet and Rukh’s president, won more than 80% of the vote in his constituency in Lvov. Other Rukh winners included Vyacheslav Chornovil, a former dissident journalist, and Mikhail Horyn, the movement’s secretary, who both served lengthy prison terms for their political activities.

All but one of the 22 constituencies in Kiev will go to a second round of voting because of the tight contests between party candidates and Rukh members.

In the Ukrainian coal mining center of Donetsk, several local Communist Party officials lost their races to candidates put up by the strike committees formed by miners last summer that now function as independent trade unions, according to the Radio Moscow news bulletin Interfax.

In Byelorussia, a small republic northwest of the Ukraine on the Soviet border with Poland, Zenon Poznyka, the leader of the Byelorussian Popular Front, won 59% of the vote in his district in the capital of Minsk, and other movement members reportedly did well in urban areas.

In Lithuania, candidates for the nationalist Sajudis movement won additional seats in runoff elections, bringing to 90 the number of seats they now hold out of the 141 that have been filled.

Times staff writer Charles P. Wallace, in Lvov, contributed to this report.