From Yeltsin, Profiles in Courage, Doubt, Despair : Russia: The president stresses his sensitive side in a volume of memoirs. Its candor astounds initial readers.

To the strains of a pianist in gold lame, diplomatic applause and the clink of champagne glasses, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin on Wednesday formally presented to the world a cry from the heart for understanding.

Much maligned by his compatriots and with his popularity at a new low, Yeltsin chose this moment to bring out “Notes of a President”--known in its American edition as “The Struggle for Russia”--in an initial Russian print run of 100,000 copies.

“Many facts, many examples and decisions in this period . . . were known only to the president,” Yeltsin, solemn but bright-eyed, told an exclusive reception in his honor. “No one else could ever write or remember them.”

And so the 63-year-old Russian president, during sleepless nights or long plane rides, dictated and wrote what he called “the live truth, written today when all this happened and is still happening.”

It may or may not contain the whole truth, but the book astounded its first Russian readers with the level of its candor--including on Yeltsin’s continuing uncertainty as to whether many of his actions have been correct.

“Here is not just a president but a person with all his sufferings and problems, which he brings onto the page without trying to hide anything,” said Omsk Gov. Leonid K. Polezhayev. “What in some eyes would seem weakness actually makes people empathize.”

Prominent theater director Mark A. Zakharov said he had stayed up until 3 a.m. the night before devouring the book. He said he had decided that “this is the truth--and that, today, is a very valuable item.”

From his family life and Kremlin infighting to his depressions and agonizing, the Russian president bares much of his internal life to his readers in a seeming attempt to do away in one blow with his image as remote, ailing and ill advised. He wanted in part, he writes, “to destroy the stereotype of the hard-boiled, rigid leader.”

Some of the book’s more sensational revelations had already been leaked, particularly tales of how the Russian government hung by a thread during the October fight for the White House in Moscow.

But for Russian readers who are likely to enjoy the simple style that Zakharov compared to Leo Tolstoy’s, the book offers one jaw-dropper after another, from Yeltsin’s assessment of who his real friends are to his description of how his aides cheer him up when he sinks into gloomy passivity.

The millions who have been baffled by many of their president’s moves are likely to feel, after digesting his writings, that they at least have a solid sense of him as a person far more multidimensional than the Russian muzhik , or macho peasant, he often portrays himself to be.

Yeltsin lingers in detail on his emotions, describing the “agonizing process of decision-making” when he contemplated dissolving Parliament last September, or how he hates “public beating, when everyone gangs up on you and pounds you from every side.”

His account of the harrowing trials of office could fail to win sympathy only from the most disillusioned of voters.

“The debilitating bouts of depression,” he writes, “the grave second thoughts, the insomnia and headaches in the middle of the night, the tears and despair, the sadness at the appearance of Moscow and other Russian cities, the flood of criticism from the newspapers and television every day, the harassment campaign at the Congress sessions, the entire burden of the decisions made, the hurt from people close to me who did not support me at the last minute, who didn’t hold up, who deceived me--I have had to bear all of this.”

Yeltsin also writes openly on a wide range of Kremlin tangles and snafus, doing little to dispel the impression that his government suffers from a chronic lack of coordination and professionalism. He even mentions how the TelePrompTer broke down when he was taping his critical speech last September dissolving the Parliament.

He talks about his car accident, his plane accident, former Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi’s criticism of his poor clothes style, a minister’s attempts to link him to a Western businessman suspected of corrupting Russian officials. He admits to a great many mistakes but sounds convincing when he attributes them to circumstance.

On government disorder, for example, he writes: “We had to figure out everything from the start. What was a vice president? How should a Russian constitutional court look? There was nothing but blank space because no such institution had previously existed in Russia. . . . We had to proceed not from how people did things somewhere else, but from our own experience. But we didn’t have any.”

Kremlinologists will have a field day with Yeltsin’s detailed descriptions of how his close aide Viktor Ilyushin plans the president’s days and overburdens his schedule. And history will surely make much of Yeltsin’s description of the political intuition that moved him to sign the Russian-Ukrainian-Belarussian treaty that effectively dissolved the Soviet Union in December, 1991.

“Perhaps I didn’t completely fathom the prospects opening up before me, but I felt in my heart that such major decisions had to be taken easily, “ he writes.

His candor includes leaks from KGB documents he inherited in the Kremlin, including a report alleging that three Texas oil tycoons ordered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Yeltsin acknowledges that he does not always take care of himself, but he offers no confirmation at all of widespread reports that he is ailing. “The main problem with being president is the constant sense that you are inside a glass bowl for everyone to see, or in a kind of barometric chamber with an artificial atmosphere where you must stay all the time,” he notes. “Soon you have the sensation that you are swathed in cotton.”

Overall, Yeltsin says as he ends the opus, “the chief goal of this restless president is Russia’s tranquillity.”

His latest push for peace has come in the form of his campaign for all of Russia’s parties and social groups to sign a political truce, agreeing to refrain from strikes, violent protests and demands for early presidential elections for two years.

The pact’s signing was scheduled for today, but the going looked rocky after the Duma, the lower house of Parliament, demanded Wednesday that Yeltsin fire his interior minister in the wake of the apparently mob-related slaying of a 36-year-old Duma deputy who had published a list of top crime leaders.

Some factions asked for the truce signing to be postponed because of the murder or rejected it altogether. Deputies also demanded a decisive crackdown by Yeltsin on crime. Yeltsin expressed his condolences and promised an investigation but appeared unlikely to fire his loyal interior minister.