NATIONAL REFORM : Women a Potent Anti-Yeltsin Force in Russia : Protesters at recent rally long for the quiet old days of the Soviet regime. President appeals to his nation’s ‘dear ladies’ to help rebuild country.

Last year, protesters banged empty pots and pans. This year, said organizers of the anti-government rally to mark International Women’s Day, almost no one could spare the pots to dent.

But they came anyway, about 1,000 women and men, to turn what used to be a homey holiday akin to Mother’s Day, with flowers given and festive dinners consumed, into one more weapon in Russia’s political battles.

And Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin joined in the fray, taking to the airwaves to court Russia’s “dear ladies” in an appeal that amounted to the clearest sign yet that women in the new Russia are coalescing into a real political force.

At the rally in a snowy park near the Russian White House on Tuesday, engineer Galina Belova said she was “protesting against the situation of women and of people in general in our country.”

“Russian women are very peaceful homebodies. We care about our homes and children, but life has forced us to go out into the streets because it’s gotten so bad,” she said.

The rally appealed to protesters’ nostalgia for the quiet old days of the Soviet regime, slipping easily from Women’s Day congratulations into indictments of the Russian government for the falling standard of living and general instability. Yeltsin had already preempted the protesters, however, by appearing on national television with a smiling holiday speech that also began as simple congratulations and then segued into an appeal for support.

“A woman’s heart has a unique ability to delicately respond to joys and sorrows,” Yeltsin said. “It is my conviction that we are all united by our common concern for Russia and our interest in establishing a normal life as soon as possible.

“There is much alienation, hatred and even aggressiveness in our society,” he said. “But still it possesses colossal creative energy.”

Yeltsin’s appeal to Russian women was a variation on what has become his central theme in the last two weeks: the country’s need to forsake its political conflicts and join in constructive work to impose elementary order in everything from the economy to law enforcement.

“I know that in this I will have your support--the support of Russian women,” he said.

Whether Russian women will support Yeltsin remains deeply in doubt, however, because many of them are among those who have been hit hardest by his radical economic reforms of the last two years.

Between 70% and 75% of Russia’s unemployed are women, although women make up 50% of the nation’s work force. And women’s salaries are falling further and further behind men’s. Under the Soviet regime, women earned an average of 70% what men did; now, under the harsh practices of Russia’s early capitalism, that figure has fallen to 40%.

Women of Russia, the women’s party that emerged in last December’s parliamentary elections and garnered an unexpected 23 seats of 450 in the lower chamber, is more closely allied to the Communist opposition than to the Yeltsin camp.

Still, it is striking that Russian women could show nostalgia for the Soviet Communist era. The old regime was so indifferent to women’s concerns that it fostered one of the highest abortion rates in the world by failing to provide birth control pills and other contraceptive devices. It was decades behind the rest of the world in launching the production of tampons and tolerated poor obstetric care and high infant mortality rates.

Unlike American women who fought to be allowed into the workplace, Soviet women had to struggle to be allowed to stay home, because the regime preached that everyone should work, even the mothers of toddlers. Feminism is only now beginning to take root here, in part because Russian women saw it as part of an assault on their femininity.

But for all the Soviet regime’s neglect of women, Galina Belova said at the Women’s Day rally that she would happily go back in time if she could, and that she sees Yeltsin as the main enemy.

“There used to be at least a secure minimum we could count on,” she said. “Now, I feel humiliated. I can’t get medicine for my sick mother. In the old days, I never had to sell anything of mine. Now, I’ve had to sell my coat.”

“We’re so long-suffering that, involuntarily, we’ve gotten involved in politics,” pensioner Alexandra Romanova said. “If everything were all right, we’d be home baking for the holiday.”