Kazakh Vote Could Stoke Fires of Reform : Soviet Union: Leader of the republic promises quick steps toward privatization and a break from Moscow economics.

Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, unopposed for election as the president of Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia, said Sunday that he views the vote as a referendum on his plans to introduce a free-market economy in the republic and will take his virtually certain victory as a mandate to privatize state-owned industry and agriculture there.

Nazarbayev said that Kazakhstan will also move faster to assume control of its natural resources and take bolder steps to free itself economically from the dying Soviet economy.

“I do not think that people should vote for me as much as for the program we are proposing so that we can bear the difficult transition period,” Nazarbayev said after casting his own ballot in Alma-Ata, the Kazakh capital.

One of the Soviet Union’s most influential leaders, ranking after Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Russia’s Boris N. Yeltsin, Nazarbayev has promoted the establishment of a new confederation to replace the Soviet Union, giving his republic an independent status within a decentralized structure.

Kapar Bukenov, the chairman of Kazakhstan’s election commission, said that more than 87% of the republic’s 9.8 million voters went to the polls Sunday despite the fact that Nazarbayev was unopposed.

“People were unusually anxious to vote,” Bukenov told journalists in Alma-Ata. “This shows that most of them support the ideas and programs of Nazarbayev.

“People are now waiting for improvements in the economy. They need a person who knows how to do it.”

Nazarbayev, 51, recently received a 90% favorable rating in a public opinion poll in Kazakhstan, and despite the proliferation of political groups in the republic, mostly among Kazakh nationalists, no rival candidates emerged to challenge him.

“I think that it was a blessing for Kazakhstan that there were no alternative candidates . . . at a time when, to my great regret, parties and movements are being created along nationalist lines,” Nazarbayev commented Sunday.

Kazakhstan’s population of 16.5 million is more Russian, about 41%, than Kazakh, 36%. Ukrainians, Germans and other ethnic groups from Central Asia make up the balance.

Despite criticism from radicals of his centrist approach to most issues, including independence, and from conservatives apprehensive about the coming changes, Nazarbayev appears to have mastered the politics needed to push ahead with fundamental reforms without plunging the republic into chaos.

“The Kazakhs are happy because Nazarbayev is one of them, and the Russians support him because they worry about what would happen if someone else were in charge,” Bulatbek Akhmet-Ali, a leader of Alash, a small Kazakh nationalist group, commented.

To win election--and become Kazakhstan’s first popularly chosen president--Nazarbayev must receive more than half of the votes cast.

Under the Soviet election system, voters may cross a candidate’s name off the ballot, and if he fails to win more than 50% of the votes, he loses, even if unopposed.

With the results expected today, Nazarbayev has scheduled a news conference to outline his plans for further economic reforms.

In campaigning before the election, Nazarbayev had served notice that a vote for him would be a vote for painful economic reforms. “It is very unpleasant,” he said in a newspaper interview, “but I have come to the conclusion that we have to apply pressure to push through the privatization plan by next spring.”

This would mean an end to government subsidies for those enterprises and farms now owned by the state and higher prices for their customers.