Adulation, Fervor Greet Yeltsin as He Stumps for Russian Presidency : Soviet Union: The people of Tula see him as equal parts candidate and savior--even though he momentarily forgets the name of their town.

He muddled the name of the city, stood up its biggest factory bosses and had the damnedest time getting his microphone to work, but when Boris N. Yeltsin made a whistle-stop in this ancient town of arms craftsmen this week, he was just about the biggest thing to come its way since Peter the Great.

By the thousands, the workers of Tula sneaked away from their munitions plants to hear Yeltsin speak and support his bid to become the first president in Russian history.

Except they seemed to be greeting him not with the affectionate skepticism accorded to a presidential candidate but with the fervent adulation lavished on the czars of old.

They waved, chanted his name and showered him with lilacs, shouting out their problems to him from the crowd and calling for God’s blessing on his snowy white head.

“We’re pinning all our hopes on him,” pensioner Margarita Oreshnikova said, looking up toward the podium from which the Russian leader looked out, his fist half-raised in greeting, over the mass of people jostling to get closer to him. “We’re like slaves, and we’re counting on Yeltsin to give us freedom.”

In fine form despite back pain that his aides said made him cancel an early morning meeting with defense factory directors, Yeltsin lived up to his reputation as a consummate populist, finding the right words for the right crowd at stop after stop through a crammed day of campaigning.

To the adoring masses in front of Tula’s white marble Town Hall, he said: “This is our main goal--Russian sovereignty! Some people tell me that because of that sovereignty, you attack (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev and so forth and so on. Yes! I’m ready to quarrel with the Lord God himself for the sake of Russia!”

To a gathering of rectors of the Russian republic’s universities and institutes, he proclaimed that education would receive “super priority” in funding and soberly pledged that he would win schools the right to keep more of the hard currency they earn from foreign students.

True, he muffed the name of the city once, forgetting that he had left the nearby town of Kaluga the night before, but that was easily corrected after a host’s judicious whisper in his ear.

And at a military base outside Tula, where he watched paratroopers trailing red-and-blue Russian flags descend from low-flying planes, he promised 500 apartments for officers left homeless after their hurried pullout from Eastern Europe.

Yeltsin, considered unbeatable in elections scheduled for June 12, refused to comment on his opponents, saying he had too often been the subject of mudslinging himself.

But that didn’t stop his avid supporters from distributing leaflets accusing former Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, Yeltsin’s most formidable challenger and the Communist Party’s chosen candidate, of hiding information on the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident and ruining the Soviet economy.

“Yeltsin is our future,” the leaflets said. “Ryzhkov means a return to the past, to the gloomy omnipotence of the party apparatus.”

That is more than mere rhetoric, campaign manager Mikhail S. Zhuchkov said. Once elected, Yeltsin plans to call popular elections for all of Russia’s local leadership spots, from mayors to regional bosses, and thus sweep aside the old guard who have been blocking his radical reforms.

“That’s just the quiet, bloodless revolution we need,” Zhuchkov said.

They were enthusiastic Yeltsin fans, the handful of activists from the Democratic Russia umbrella group who helped set up the visit, but unpracticed, with a long way to go before they reach the effectiveness of even a typical American ward committee.

Perspiring freely in an airless, humid room in a town hall the night before Yeltsin arrived, a dozen campaign workers went on at length about their candidate’s virtues--”If Yeltsin is elected, my whole life will take on new meaning,” factory worker Galina Malinina said. But they had less to say when asked about their tactics and funding.

At this point, less than two weeks before the elections in their town of almost 600,000, their coffer held a measly 2,000 rubles--about $1,100 at the commercial rate of exchange.

“For Russia, this is all new,” Alexander Yermakov, editor of the daily Tulskiye Izvestia newspaper, said, adding that he worries that Russians see Yeltsin more as a ruler than a president.

“I’m deeply convinced that the Russian people’s need for a charismatic leader will be with us for a long time,” he said. “They can’t live without a czar for long.”

Officials said that Tula took longer than other Russian cities to start developing anti-Communist forces and support for Yeltsin because as a bastion of military factories traditionally well supplied and served by the party, it had little reason to turn radical.

But in the last two years, central supplies dwindled and the trend grew for regions to barter among themselves. Tula, rich and renowned since Peter the Great took a special interest in it and turned it into a center for producing samovars and weapons, suddenly found itself hungry, without home-grown food and forbidden to trade its arms for grain.

“The food situation is very bad now,” Mayor Nikolai N. Tyutyunov said. “We feel that we’re being shortchanged.”

Tyutyunov said that residents get ration coupons each month for about one pound of beef, a pound of oil, a half pound of butter and one bottle of vodka.

With a population frightened of hunger, food becomes a major campaign issue, and Yeltsin played up his promises to help Tula by guaranteeing it extra money to buy produce and to increase food imports until Russia can grow more of its own.

For all his skill at pleasing crowds, when Yeltsin departed, he left in his wake resentment among the bosses of Tula defense factories, the very men--and they were virtually all men, middle-aged and dressed in suits of gray, brown or blue--who are considered the core of Ryzhkov’s support.

Yeltsin supporters said defense factory bosses are doing all they can to support Ryzhkov, and a poll in Tulskiye Izvestia--the Tula media’s first local poll ever--showed that Ryzhkov enjoyed a decent measure of support in the city--14% compared to Yeltsin’s 58% among those who have already decided how they will vote.

According to far-fetched rumors circulating in the city, the Communist Party apparatus is even offering 10 pounds of sugar or meat to those who vote for Ryzhkov and threatening to have those who vote for Yeltsin fired.

“Everyone lives in fear,” said Alexander Koverin, a worker at the Tula Cartridge Factory, “but everyone will vote for Yeltsin.”