For First Time, Russians Get to Pick a President : Election: Even polls by Boris Yeltsin’s rivals show him getting at least 44% of the vote today.

Nearly three-quarters of a century after the last czar was overthrown and replaced by Communists whose power proved equally absolute, Russians will vote today to choose their country’s first popularly elected leader.

Boris N. Yeltsin, 60, the bluff Siberian giant who has led the Russian Federation for the past year as chairman of its Parliament, is likely to win election as president.

But Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, 61, the former Soviet prime minister, and Vadim V. Bakatin, 53, an adviser to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, along with three minor candidates may receive enough votes to deprive Yeltsin of the first-ballot victory he seeks and force him into a runoff election.

Yeltsin’s victory nonetheless appears assured. Even his rivals’ opinion polls show him getting at least 44% of the vote today, and most surveys show him receiving more than the 50% he needs for a first-ballot win.

And that victory, Yeltsin made clear in a final campaign speech Tuesday, will be taken as a mandate for a faster and broader transformation of the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union’s largest and richest republic.

“We are going to roll, we are going to roll!” he told cheering supporters in Syktyvar, the capital of the Komi region in northwestern Russia. “With your support, the people’s support, Russia will be born again.”

The election is doubly important--first, as a historic step by Russia toward democracy and, second, in the impact that Yeltsin’s probable victory will have on the reform process in the Soviet Union as a whole.

In proposing the establishment of an executive presidency for Russia and then in seeking election to the post, Yeltsin has emphasized the need to break through the barriers he sees to change, and for that he must have power and a mandate to use it.

Campaigning over the weekend, Yeltsin said he would press ahead with economic decentralization, privatization of state-owned enterprises, distribution of agricultural land to individual farmers and other radical economic reforms.

Yeltsin said his campaign is not to change policy but to implement reforms already endorsed by the Russian Parliament. This starts with control over Russia’s natural resources and economy, then stretches to a halt to nuclear testing, an end to foreign aid and the return to religious use of Russian Orthodox churches.

Yeltsin also seeks the immense stature that election as Russia’s president would give him. Gorbachev was elected by the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Parliament, and only recently pledged that the new constitution, expected to be drafted next year, would provide for a popularly elected president of the country.

The election, Ryzhkov told a press conference, was not “a choice of personality but a choice of the path that Russia will take.”

In historical terms, Yeltsin has said he sees the election fulfilling, at last, the hopes of generations of Russians for democracy.

“Why should our people be the last in Europe to free themselves of tyranny?” Yeltsin asked a hostile television interviewer last week. “Was the czar overthrown to install a worse dictatorship?

“Understand the importance for our Russian people of electing a leader of their choice, and understand that we are doing this only on the eve of the 21st Century. We are very late.”

The voting is part of the progressive democratization that Gorbachev began six years ago--which has allowed Yeltsin to take his case to the people in two previous elections after he was purged from the Communist Party leadership as a result of his political bumptiousness.

In 1989, the first contested elections were held since the earliest years of Soviet power, and Yeltsin won election to the national Parliament from Moscow. In 1990, embryonic political parties challenged the Communists’ 70-year monopoly, and Yeltsin’s Democratic Russia won in many regional and local elections. Last month, the southern republic of Georgia installed the first popularly elected president.

More than 105 million Russians, spread across 11 time zones from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait, are eligible to vote today. Surveys by the National Public Opinion Studies Center indicate that the turnout could be more than 80%.

The center’s most recent surveys showed Yeltsin sweeping the major cities, 5-1, against all others, winning in small cities and towns by 2-1 but getting only 40% of the votes in the countryside. Overall, the center’s Data News Agency forecast that Yeltsin would receive 61% of the votes cast, with Ryzhkov the likely runner-up.

Voters in Moscow and Leningrad, the two largest Soviet cities, will also elect mayors. Radical reformers who now head the city councils are expected to win despite conservative challenges.

On the ballot in Leningrad and Sverdlovsk, an industrial center in the Ural Mountains, are proposals to restore their original names--St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg--in moves that would express the desire of residents to turn back the clock 74 years to before the Bolshevik Revolution.

In the presidential race, voters will have clear, if difficult, choices among the six candidates.

Just as Yeltsin stands for the full-speed-ahead transformation of the Soviet system, Ryzhkov argues for a carefully managed transition, warning that Yeltsin’s election would prove disastrous. Bakatin, fired by Gorbachev as too liberal an interior minister but brought back as an adviser, has tried to find a middle way, but he has been criticized as vague and indecisive.

The other three candidates are Gen. Albert M. Makashov, running as an ultra-conservative; Aman-Geldy M. Tuleyev, a Siberian official, and Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, a polyglot specialist on the Middle East who has campaigned on a platform of strong Russian nationalism and unlimited vodka sales.

The hard-line newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya reported Tuesday that Yeltsin was involved in a stillborn deal that would have allowed a British firm to sell $7.5 billion in consumer goods here and invest the resulting 140 billion rubles in Russian businesses and property. The deal was declared illegal by Moscow, and it is now cited as a bid by Yeltsin to sell off Russia’s wealth to foreigners. Yeltsin has denied any wrongdoing.

Russia Goes to the Polls

A look at today’s election in the Russian Federation, the first direct presidential balloting in the history of Russia:

* BACKGROUND: The Parliament of the Russian Federation, the largest of the 15 Soviet republics, in April created a strong presidency. The move was another step by the republic to take more control over its economy, political structure and culture.

* CANDIDATES: Boris N. Yeltsin, 60, the popular chairman of the Russian Federation’s legislature, is expected to be the top vote-getter, but he needs a simple majority to avoid a runoff. His principal rivals are former Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, 61, and former Soviet Interior Minister Vadim V. Bakatin, 53. Both have the support of the Communist Party. Other candidates are Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, Albert M. Makashov and Aman-Geldy M. Tuleyev.

* ELIGIBLE VOTERS: There are about 105 million eligible voters.