Even in Hometown, Yeltsin Fever Is Cooling : Mood: For many Russians, the personal struggle to survive economic upheaval far outweighs politics.

“Yeltsin Fund,” reads the sign on the office door, and inside the pace is furious.

Volunteers shout through shaky telephone lines and count signatures for a petition demanding the referendum that President Boris N. Yeltsin says he needs to boost the power of his office in his fight against the conservative Congress of People’s Deputies.

The woman in charge talks about the Kuzbass coal miners and the industrial workers in the city of Belgorod who have pledged to strike if the referendum is blocked and pleads for the world to help the beleaguered president.

“No other man can lead us,” she declares above the chaos around her. “No one since (early 20th-Century prime minister and agrarian reformer Pyotr A.) Stolypin has had such a vision for Russia’s revival.”

But as the turmoil unleashed by Yeltsin’s liberalization continues to grow across Russia, such wholehearted commitment to the man directing the changes is harder to find.

Even here in his hometown, the tough Urals industrial city where he carved out his political base and where his days as Communist Party boss for nearly a decade have become the stuff of legends, die-hard support extends little beyond the “Yeltsin Fund” volunteers manning the office that once served as his presidential campaign headquarters.

Whether Yeltsin’s latest confrontation with the Congress on Saturday will revive his supporters’ activism remains unclear.

But it is a powerful irony that one important reason for this dearth of political fervor here seems to lie in the very changes Yeltsin has championed.

People seem convinced that events have already propelled them beyond the grasp of reactionary Congress hard-liners in Moscow who dream of reimposing a Communist dictatorship, and the public’s dominant feeling is indifference about the fate of the man who made it possible.

“I think Yeltsin will probably survive but I don’t think it makes any difference now,” concluded former army Capt. Vladimir Petrovsky, who is launching a local business and political newsletter.

Added Irina Rahimova, vice principal at Public School No. 9 near the city center: “No one can turn the clock back now, the feeling of freedom is too deep in our hearts.”

Partly because of such convictions, few believe the city today would rise in Yeltsin’s defense as it did during the dramatic summer days of the August, 1991, coup attempt. Then, speakers addressing cheering crowds in the vast main square demanded that the local militia leave immediately by train for Moscow, 1,000 miles to the west, to defend “their Boris” and hundreds of youthful volunteers clamored to go along.

Today, 19 months later, the mood at the roots of Yeltsin’s power base has changed dramatically.

In some cases, Yeltsin’s earlier supporters have turned against him--men like physicist Sergei Isakov, who helped organize local backing for Yeltsin’s presidential election campaign two years ago, and Valery Romanov, who spent four of what he calls the best years of his life as Yeltsin’s principal deputy here in the early 1980s.

Both are convinced that Yeltsin has lost his way. His goal now, they say, is to preserve personal power.

“The reforms have gone bad,” Romanov said. “This isn’t an economy, it’s a money grab. If he pursues pure personal ambitions, he will fail.”

Even Ekaterinburg’s new mayor, Arkady Chernetsky, is careful with his endorsement, calling it “primitive” to support any one individual.

“I am a supporter of the idea of reforms, but not always of the tactics used to implement them,” he said.

But a large majority of the city’s 1.3 million residents simply no longer seem to care.

One city official estimates that a majority still support the president, but not strongly enough to go into the streets to defend him.

Political events in Moscow--events that once transfixed the nation as they unfolded during prime-time telecasts--have become remote, unimportant and irrelevant.

Western leaders have monitored every move of Yeltsin’s battle for power with the Congress earlier this month, but residents here hardly bothered to watch.

For them, the personal struggle to survive upheavals that now divide society into haves and have-nots, raise the specter of unemployment, bring the new reality of serious violent crime and drive inflation at 30% per month, are far more important than Yeltsin’s fight for survival in Moscow.

“An overwhelming mood of political apathy has settled in here,” said Boris Yarkov, political editor of one of the region’s leading dailies, For Change. “People are tired, they are fed up with politics. No one any longer thinks what happens in Moscow will change their lives.”

An emotional statement by Yeltsin’s chief spokesman, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov--made in the heat of Yeltsin’s confrontation with the Congress--that Russia stood at a crossroads between a referendum and civil war, would find little echo along Ekaterinburg’s mud- and snow-covered streets.

At least in part, the impact of Yeltsin’s reforms propels the city further from Moscow’s grasp.

Efforts to decentralize power away from Moscow, for example, have given Ekaterinburg and the sprawling region around it additional rights to manage and distribute more of their own resources.

While tension between the local executive and the legislative council slows the pace of reform much as it has in Moscow, the disputes here are devoid of ideology.

“It’s a simple, straightforward fight for power for power’s sake,” said Sergei Kazantsev, who as an employee of the executive and an elected council deputy, has a foot in both camps. “No one invokes the name of Yeltsin or (parliamentary leader Ruslan I.) Khasbulatov.”

Privatization has generated a boom in small businesses, which has also worked to loosen links to a government monolith.

Chernetsky boasts that the 10,000 new companies registered last year are not just a record for Ekaterinburg, but two to three times the number of any other similar-sized Russian city.

The growth of new businesses has helped soak up many of those forced to leave the city’s traditional employers--the giant combines producing everything from steel to paper that surround and pollute the city today much as they have since the industrial barons of czarist Russia first settled the city in the 18th Century.

For many, the chance to make one’s own way is what matters most.

“Two years ago, we all stopped work to watch the Congress, but now we know it’s up to us,” explained Konstantin Pudov, spokesman for the city administration. “How we work, what we do. That’s what matters.”

Such comments reflect a degree of change here--both material and spiritual--that has tested entrepreneurial spirit, and if the response of the people of Ekaterinburg is any measure, Russia will do well.

For in addition to the private enterprises registered last year, thousands of individuals are testing the waters of capitalism in a makeshift market as free as any Middle East bazaar.

Outside the city’s large TSUM department store, for example, shoppers run a gantlet of men and women standing and holding up a few items for sale.

Irina Koltysheva, 28, who left her job as an engineer at a state-run design institute to work in a private trading company only to see it quickly go broke, now sells clothing on commission for a Romanian trader.

She stands in a long row with others, holding women’s blouses on three coat hangers in her left hand, offering prices she says are set at 10% below those charged inside TSUM.

She works for a few hours in the morning, then again in the afternoon, before leaving to pick up her 5-year-old daughter from kindergarten.

Business, she says, depends on factory paydays; many enterprises haven’t paid their workers for two months. “It’s slow right now,” she said. “I may leave early today.”

The chaos of Russia’s economy as it creaks toward an open market is visible everywhere.

The shelves of Malyshev Street’s (Food) Shop No. 1 display Goebel beer from Detroit, Top Joy fruit juice from Budapest and vodka imported from Germany, but have been empty of local Russian milk, butter and cheese for weeks. American-made Smirnoff vodka is on display nearly everywhere in town, but local vodka is in short supply.

TSUM carries Marvel toilet cleaner, Elfkins low-cholesterol, low-fat, bite-size sandwich cookies, and Sony television sets, while small, privately run kiosks outside peddle Old Spice aftershave lotion, Lipton tea bags and the Polish edition of Penthouse magazine.

For a city that was closed to foreigners for most of the Communist era because of its defense plants, the bewildering display of new products is only one face of an outside world that has suddenly burst upon it.

There are also worrying new arrivals.

Along with unemployment and inflation, organized crime has moved in, raking in enormous profits on protection rackets, prostitution, gambling, ever-present bureaucratic corruption and gray market trade in everything from zinc ore to tennis shoes.

Asked to name the city’s most powerful individual, political commentator Yarkov didn’t hesitate: the mafioso whose turf includes the huge Uralmash factory complex.

Among the handful of luxury cars that now move through the city’s crowded streets is a white Cadillac stretch limousine with Texas license plates.

“It’s owned by one of the first-generation mafiosi,” explained city spokesman Pudov.

Reform has also hit the factories west of the city center that once produced SS-20 missiles and other military equipment.

With defense spending drastically reduced, Pudov says that conversion to civilian production has already reached 90% in some cases.

At the Uralmash industrial combine, a team of young, aggressive managers works on a joint venture with Caterpillar, meets with Western consultants on how best to privatize amid an economic collapse that last year cut the combine’s production by 30% and cost 3,500 jobs.

Andrei M. Lutsenko, the 30-year-old director of Uralmash’s privatization, agrees that cutting 5,000 to 7,000 more employees from the present work force of 32,000 won’t be easy, but he’s in a hurry.

That is one development he fears might be reversed if hard-liners force Yeltsin to drop the chairman of Russia’s privatization program, Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly B. Chubais.

“We’d like to complete it (the privatization) by the end of this summer,” he said. “They get rid of Chubais, it will be a severe blow.”

While the myriad changes that have come to the city have meant belt-tightening new hardships, most people said they would not want to return to the Communist era when price hikes were as limited as personal horizons.

“It’s better now,” said Rahimova. “For me, my family and my students. It won’t come fast because this is Russia, but for the first time, there is a future for us all.”