Ex-Party Boss Now Rides the Bus, Endures Wisecracks : Soviet Union: His attitude during the coup toppled port city’s top official. He also lost car, driver and dacha.

An efficient bureaucrat has already scraped the name of Alexei Abramovitch Volentfev from its place of honor in the lobby of Vladivostok’s city hall.

Next to the title Chairman there is a blank--a final insult delivered to the 51-year-old Communist Party veteran, along with the wisecracks and smirks that he must endure daily now that he is no longer a person of influence.

Volentfev was the top government official in this strategic port city on the Pacific Ocean when he was dismissed Aug. 27 by the local legislature that he had chaired.

He was among about 20 regional leaders in the Russian Federation who were deposed after being accused of supporting the coup d’etat by Communist hard-liners against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, which collapsed three days after it began on Aug. 19.

Volentfev vehemently denied having backed the coup, and his political supporters contend that his worst sin was his silence--a fatal error of hesitation at a time when democrats were proclaiming their loyalties from the rooftops.

“I didn’t betray the people or the Russian government,” Volentfev insisted in an interview in his former ninth-floor office with its commanding view of ships in the Vladivostok harbor.

Once the inner sanctum of Soviet power in the Far East, the office is now bare, and the miniature switchboard behind the desk no longer lights up with urgent calls.

“I lost everything--my dacha, my car and driver and my salary. Now I’m unemployed and I have to look for work,” he said. “It was too severe for what I did.”

Now, when he travels about the city--riding buses and trams, by his account--people make “negative remarks” about their former leader.

There were no specific charges against Volentfev, but two particular actions raised a lot of suspicions.

On Aug. 20, the day after the coup began, Volentfev formed a “consultative group” of military officers and KGB men that sounded suspiciously similar to the State Emergency Committee that clumsily attempted to seize power in Moscow.

On the following day, Volentfev went on television, appealed for calm and urged workers and farmers not to strike, which ran counter to the appeal of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin for a general strike.

At the same time, Vladimir Kuznetsov, head of Vladivostok’s regional executive committee, was issuing public denunciations of the coup as unconstitutional and attacking its leaders.

The city government, in fact, was printing Yeltsin’s statements on a government photocopier. One impassioned naval officer even sailed his nuclear submarine out into the Pacific to protest the takeover.

“I admit that I did not take any overt action in support of Yeltsin,” Volentfev said. “It’s true there were no words in support of the Russian government, but there was not a word supporting the coup.

“I took it as my main task to keep the situation quiet in the region.”

In his defense, Volentfev said that he never heeded the coup leaders’ call for a curfew or a ban on demonstrations. He also allowed the press to print what it wished, including Yeltsin’s statements, without interference, although state radio was shut down at the start of the coup.

Volentfev admitted his inaction in a speech to the local council in which he begged to be allowed to retire with dignity.

The legislature, unappeased, fired him instead.

“Everything he says is totally false,” said Viktor Lebedev, a music teacher who is one of the leading democrats in Vladivostok. “All these people of the old system used their positions against democracy.”

Lebedev said that if the coup had lasted a few more days, Volentfev’s so-called consultative group would have emerged as a mini-coup committee in the Soviet Far East.

The shock of Volentfev’s humiliation caused him to suffer a mild heart attack, the ex-chairman said. He went into a sanitarium to recover and has only now emerged to pick up the pieces of his life.

A mining engineer by training, Volentfev spent most of his career as an industrial specialist with the local Communist Party. When he became head of the regional government last year, he was still the party’s first secretary in the area.

Acknowledging that he remains a Communist believer despite the coup, Volentfev argued that the country has fallen on hard times because of a “lack of discipline.”

The party was disbanded by Gorbachev after the failure of the coup, and Volentfev expressed his belief that the democrats in the Russian government had used the coup to fulfill an old agenda aimed at dismantling the party structure in the country.

Volentfev said he clashed earlier in the year with radicals who wanted to halt shipments of fish from the Pacific coast to the hinterlands until rural areas made good on their promised deliveries of meat and milk. He said he feared that rural areas would starve without the fish.

Yuri V. Mokeyev, editor of Vladivostok’s daily newspaper Morning Russia, said he considers Volentfev an honest man, “but he was too cautious and took his time. I don’t think he supported the coup, but there are different meanings to be found in his behavior.”

Mokeyev, who was also a senior Communist Party member, said he had fired off a telegram to the party’s Central Committee headquarters in Moscow complaining that the coup was unconstitutional.

While Volentfev denied that he had found a new job, Mokeyev’s newspaper carried an item noting that an “A. Volentfev” had been appointed local representative of the All-Union Fund for the Protection of the Unemployed. It will help set up companies to employ those currently out of work.

“All the party people who lost their jobs have already started working for new joint ventures--now they have the best jobs,” said Igor Kotz, correspondent in Vladivostok for the magazine Rodina.

Volentfev remains a member of the Russian Parliament, where he has been considered a leading member of the conservative faction, and he sees no moral reason to give up the job simply because he was fired in Vladivostok.

“I’m not the only person who didn’t publicly support Yeltsin,” he said. “If everyone who didn’t speak out resigned from the Parliament, there would be no one left.”