Soviet Union : They Still Love Him in Ekaterinburg : Yeltsin: Residents of the Ural Mountains city where Boris got his start fondly recall his human touch--and his hands-on approach to problem-solving.

As Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin moved with such speed to expand his power in the wake of August’s abortive coup, many began to reassess their views of the man initially hailed as democracy’s hero. But here in the city that knows his political style better than any, there are no such worries.

Residents of this large Ural Mountains industrial center look back on the decade between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, when Yeltsin presided over the regional Communist Party, as a time when things worked because he cared about the people.

“He lacks experience, education and an intellectual basis, but life was much better when he was here, so as a party leader, I think he’s great,” summed up Irina Rahimov, the vice principal of a local school. “Transportation, heating, food--they were all better, and the reason was he always checked himself.

“When the buses were bad, he knew immediately because he rode in them, not in these black limousines,” she added. “If he’s able to find people to work like that in Moscow, then he can bring Russia through.”

Yeltsin’s habit of taking public buses or dropping by local food stores to check on supplies was dismissed as grandstanding by senior Moscow party members in the months after Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev plucked him out of relative obscurity in Sverdlovsk--as Ekaterinburg was known during the Communist era--and brought him to Moscow in 1985 as head of the city construction department.

But just as that style gave him a popular power base in Moscow, so too has it left him a special place in the hopes of his hometown’s people.

“Moscow won’t corrupt Boris Yeltsin,” said Nelly Serebriakova, who works at a city food store.

She says she has a picture of him on the wall at home and points to a profile of Yeltsin’s mother and brother, cut from a recent edition of the local newspaper. The article, which says they enjoy no special privileges as the Russian president’s family, reinforces the local image of an incorruptible man of the people.

Dmitri Martynoff, who works as a translator at the Ural Information Service here, recalls that during the Russian election campaign last June, an Australian television film crew took its own straw poll among workers leaving the city’s huge Uralmash heavy machinery plant.

“Of the 40 people they questioned, two refused to answer, one said he preferred (opposition candidate Vadim V.) Bakatin and 37 said they would vote for Yeltsin,” Martynoff said. “He’s a symbol of democracy here. The workers believe in him and no one else.”

This showed during the tense days of the attempted coup. Locals are quick to tell visitors how several hundred young people gathered in the city’s central square in the early hours of the coup, demanding transportation that would take them the 1,000 miles west to Moscow and the barricades of the Russian White House, where Yeltsin directed the resistance.

Local government officials addressed army units in the city. A rock concert the following evening quickly turned into an anti-coup rally, with organizers demanding that the local militia be dispatched immediately to defend the Russian president.

Yeltsin’s image has also been enhanced here by his early defection from the Communist Party.

Communist officials recently collected their belongings in advance of being evicted from the city council’s main building, and those who stayed behind are pondering what to do about the huge bronze statue of V. I. Lenin in the town square. Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s image is clean.

Residents don’t even fault him for carrying out the party’s Central Committee order in 1977 to bulldoze the home in the city where Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918. The order was issued after interest in the czar and the way he died had turned the house into the end point of a pilgrimage, an embarrassing situation for local Communist authorities.

Born in the village of Butko outside Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute here, worked in a series of construction enterprises in this city and eventually held sway as the Sverdlovsk regional party chief for nearly a decade before Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev brought him to Moscow in 1985.

But locals insist that even before Yeltsin’s dramatic rise, they understood that he was a breed apart. And as winter closes in and food becomes scarcer, many in the city say they are reassured by his position of power.

“He’s our only real hope,” said Nilolai Kalanin, lay administrator at a local Russian Orthodox church. “He won’t forget the Urals.”