Many Russians See Yeltsin as Their Only Hope : Election: Atmosphere is somber but determined as federation’s voters set out to choose their first president.

Casting her vote Wednesday for Russia’s first president in its more than 1,000-year history, Natalya L. Shiryeva said the election is a test of her people’s will to take their future into their own hands.

“It’s like an exam for our people,” said the 45-year-old Shiryeva. “It will show if we have any hope as a people. If we pass the exam, we will start to live as people should live. We will no longer act only on orders.

“From now on, we will make up our own minds on how we want our country to be run and not depend on the Communist Party to make all our decisions for us, as we did for 72 years.”

While the mood at Soviet elections in recent years has been festive, with people still excited to have a choice after decades of one-candidate ballots, the atmosphere at the polls this time was somber and determined.

“This election is crucially important,” Shiryeva continued. “Only Yeltsin can lead the revival of Russia. If Yeltsin wins, democracy wins. Once this democracy is in place, if we’re not satisfied with Yeltsin, we’ll just replace him with another democrat.”

Boris N. Yeltsin, 60, popular chairman of the Russian Federation’s legislature, faced five other candidates in Wednesday’s election.

Shiryeva and many others at the polls agreed that electing any of the other candidates in the race would lead the Russian people back on the path they have been struggling to abandon over the last few years.

“If Yeltsin loses, it will be the beginning of the end for Russia,” said Shiryeva’s husband Yuri, 54, a writer. “A period of bloody repression will surely follow.”

While most of the other candidates want to minimize changes to Russia’s planned, state-run economy, Yeltsin has pledged to make state-owned businesses private, create the private ownership of land and establish other conditions necessary for a free-market economy to flourish.

Andrei A. Yangel, 25, director of a small computer software enterprise, said that with Yeltsin as president, companies such as his will have a fighting chance.

“Of course, it’s good that an election for president is happening at last in the Soviet Union, but the results are most important,” Yangel said. “If Yeltsin wins, there will be an end to the endless economic experiments by Communist leaders.

“I hope there will be more freedom for enterprises like mine and a more favorable tax system. The current tax system doesn’t let companies develop normally.”

Many of the voters brought their children along to witness the momentous occasion and to drop paper ballots into plain wooden boxes for their parents or grandparents.

Russians vote by crossing out the names of all candidates except the one they choose; if they wish, they can also cross out all the candidates. The ballots are counted and recounted by hand at the voting stations. The results are telephoned to regional centers and then on to the central election committee in Moscow.

Although full but still provisional results will not be published until Monday, preliminary returns should be available today. Many Russians will be impatient to hear the outcome.

“It’s the only chance we have left for a real future,” Nina N. Kokmanskaya, 65, an information officer for the oil and gas industries, said after her granddaughter, Liza, 4, reached up and slipped the ballots into the box under a large statue of Vladimir I. Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union.

“I like Yeltsin because he’s shown that he can achieve things even in very difficult circumstances. Most politicians just talk, but he and his people work. Just look at all the laws they’ve passed on everything from privatization to land reform.”

Her son-in-law, Alexander A. Kozlov, 32, a sculptor, said this election is an important step in the breakup of the old system under which the Communist Party controlled everything from education to nuclear weapons to trash collection.

“We never elected our leader before, so our leaders never felt responsible to the people,” Kozlov said. “This will be the people of Russia (gaining) leverage over their own future.”

But many people accustomed to guaranteed employment and state-supplied housing are worried that massive unemployment and widespread poverty will result from Yeltsin’s plan to accelerate the reshaping of the Russian economy based on market forces.

They tend to support former Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, who promises not to make any drastic changes in the economy and yet to increase production, lower prices and increase wages at once.

“I voted for Ryzhkov,” said Liliya K. Tikhomirova, 52, a biophysicist who was at the polls with her granddaughter. “Now I make a decent salary, but if Yeltsin’s program for privatization goes into effect, my salary will be worth nothing and I will be in the poorest sector. How will my grandchildren live in the society he wants to build?”

Voters disagreed not only on which candidate should take the republic into the future but also on whether or not Russia should even have a popularly elected president.

“I don’t think we need a Russian president,” said Andrei Y. Chernyshev, 28, an executive assistant at an automobile and tractor export company and a Communist Party member. “Everyone complains that there was dictatorship by the Communist Party for decades in this country. I think Yeltsin will just replace that with a new dictatorship of Democratic Russia, the party that supports him.”