Far From Moscow, People Shrug Off Coup : Reaction: Protests, outrage, support for Gorbachev? Not in Nakhodka.

For perhaps the 50th time Monday, Valentina Martienko picked up the phone in her City Hall office to face the same question.

“Yes, it seems to be a coup,” Martienko, assistant to the City Council chairman, answered calmly. After a pause and a hum of agreement, she hung up, her expression still serene.

Every conversation had been the same, Martienko said.

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s a coup.”

“Yes, so do I.”

But that was as far as it went Monday--bewildered telephoning and fevered exchange of speculation--when this sleepy Pacific seaside town got the news that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had been ousted and replaced by a tough new state emergency committee.

There were no protests, no public expressions of anger, no trumpeted declarations of solidarity with Gorbachev or loud rejections of the new eight-member committee in this quiet corner of the Soviet Union, a town of 190,000 typical of the far-flung provinces that Russians call “the periphery.”

“The mass of people are absolutely indifferent,” said Oleg Bulyndenko, a progressive City Council deputy. “That’s what the country has come to today, and that’s the saddest thing in all this.”

He added that the public will shed few tears for Gorbachev. “They were used to a firm hand,” he said, implying that Gorbachev’s was not. “A slave who gets freedom can’t adjust to it right away.”

Crossing in front of City Hall with two heavy shopping bags, a middle-aged woman, her hair dyed bright orange, bore out Bulyndenko’s prediction.

“I think things will be better now,” she said. “Now that they have removed him, things can only get better.”

Valentina, a secretary waiting with her school-aged daughter on a street corner for a taxi, said that her first reaction upon hearing the committee’s announcement was “fear--fear about what will happen to me and my child.”

“It’s the membership of the committee that scares me,” she said, referring to the heads of defense, internal affairs and the KGB. “With such a committee created, it’s hard to say what will happen.”

But ultimately, she said, she expected even such dramatic high-level politics to have no concrete effect on her life.

Nakhodka residents repeatedly compared Gorbachev’s probable fate to that of former Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, who also fell from power while on vacation in the Crimea.

“But at least they let Khrushchev come back to Moscow,” joked Igor Ustynov, chairman of the City Council.

He quickly turned serious, however.

“It’s very unclear what’s happened to Gorbachev,” he said. “This superfluous secrecy only worsens the situation.”

In his announcement of the takeover, acting President Gennady I. Yanayev said Gorbachev was being replaced for health reasons. At a press conference, Yanayev expanded on that, saying that Gorbachev was “on vacation” in an undisclosed “safe place.”

“He is very tired after all these years, and he will need some time to get better. We hope . . . he will take office again,” Yanayev said.

But a spokesman for Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, the largest of the Soviet republics, said that Gorbachev was under house arrest at his vacation home in the Crimea.

Bulyndenko asserted that Russian opposition politicians would probably try to arrange a civil disobedience campaign.

“It would be a betrayal on our part if we didn’t try,” he said. “It would be just too painful to be thrown back to 1985. We’ve paid too high a price these last six years for the democratic freedoms we’ve attained.”

However, he doubted that provincial Russia would rise up to protest the coup.

The question of just how far reforms would be rolled back quickly became a central topic of political conversation.

Local journalists said they had been warned not to comment on the new regime--as they would have been under old Communist Party censorship.

Ustynov said that during a quick meeting convened Monday to allow top city politicians to exchange information on developments in the Kremlin, one young deputy predicted, “There will be prison camps again, and they’re sure to take me.”

Ustynov said he disagreed with that assessment.

“A move backward today to the old degree (of repression) is impossible,” he said. “Today, the only possibility is the Chile model. People may be marched into a stadium and killed, but the quiet model of 1937, when people were taken away at night, is impossible.”