Yeltsin Urges Russia to Reject Communists : Elections: Remember past offenses and choose democratic freedom, president says in stump for reformists. Vote is Sunday.

President Boris N. Yeltsin ardently urged his fellow Russians on Friday to peer through the gloss they have put on the good old days of communism and reexamine the actual repression and denigration they suffered.

“You should not allow the forces of the past to seize power again,” Yeltsin, hale and feisty after seven weeks of treatment for heart trouble, warned in a televised address two days before parliamentary elections.

“You should not allow the country to be taken back to the time when everyone was told what to think, what clothes to wear, which hairdo to have and what songs to sing,” he said in an obvious swipe at the resurgent Communist Party, which is poised to do well in Sunday’s vote.

Yeltsin likened the democratic freedoms Russians already take for granted to the air they breathe: “You don’t notice it when you have it, but its absence would be felt immediately.”

His appeal for support of a reform movement that has heaped new hardships on many families was clearly aimed at boosting the prospects of the centrist Our Home Is Russia bloc he is aligned with against the Communists.

Yeltsin never mentioned a single politician or party by name, but the cleverly constructed speech delivered unmistakable blasts to the Communists, ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky and retired army general Alexander I. Lebed, who has campaigned for a “strong hand” to rein in crime and corruption.

Turnout forecasts range as high as 75%--three times the share needed for validation--but polls show as much as half of the electorate is still unsure which of the 43 parties and blocs to vote for.

Women and young people make up the bulk of the undecideds.

Yeltsin urged Russians to use their political voices, which were silenced for so long.

“Today, life itself insistently asks every young person: What Russia do you want for yourself and your children?” Yeltsin said. “I do not believe that you do not care!”

To those of his own generation, the 64-year-old Yeltsin called for a sober recollection of the past and of the Stalinist ordeals endured by long-suffering parents.

“They knew what hunger was like, what real fear was like and what mass repressions were like,” Yeltsin said earnestly. “And they did not learn about it from books.”

How much influence the president’s appeal was likely to have on voters was unclear, although the 10-minute speech was aired at dinner time and again on major news programs.

Broad dissatisfaction with soaring prices, persistent inflation and growing unemployment have undermined popular support for the country’s transition to a market economy and provided fertile ground for the well-organized Communist Party to sow resentment.

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Public opinion polls, although of questionable reliability in Russia, show the Communists poised to play kingmaker in building a coalition in the 450-seat Duma. Most polls suggest that the former ruling party will get at least 10% of the fractured vote, and some forecast as much as a 25% share.

Our Home Is Russia, led by Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, is also virtually assured of winning at least the 5% of all votes cast needed to take seats in the Duma, as is Zhirinovsky’s extremist Liberal Democratic Party, Grigory A. Yavlinsky’s pro-reform Yabloko movement, the moderate Women of Russia party and Lebed’s nationalist Congress of Russian Communities.

Voting has already begun in some remote regions of Russia and in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, where federal troops have been fighting off attempts by Chechen rebels to disrupt the local elections.

At least 22 Russian soldiers have been killed and dozens more injured in ambushes by guerrillas opposed to the Chechen elections, which serve to recognize Moscow’s sovereignty over the republic and seek to replace its rebel leadership with Kremlin-installed officials.