A Proud Day for Armenia as It Chooses First President : Politics: But for the Soviet Union, it’s yet another episode in the crumbling of the edifice.

For Aida Gazaryan, a solidly built school administrator and an ebullient gourmet, the choice all Armenia had to make Wednesday was clear. On the one hand, there was yesterday’s hero; on the other, the best man for tomorrow.

“The meaning of independence was told to us for the first time by Paruir Airikyan, it is true,” the 45-year-old educator mused over thimbles of vanilla-scented cognac she shared with a visitor. “But Paruir has such a fanatical sense of what is right and wrong. Levon Ter-Petrosyan, on the other hand, thinks of the welfare of everybody.”

The people of Armenia, the smallest of the Soviet republics, went to the polls on Wednesday to choose the first president in their long history, yet another episode in the crumbling of the Soviet economic and political edifice. Ter-Petrosyan, 49, a Syrian-born expert in ancient cultures and chairman of the Armenian legislature, was favored to win by a landslide.

With great pride, however, Armenians pointed out that unlike their counterparts in some Soviet republics, they could choose their leaders from a slate of several candidates, one of whom was Airikyan, 42, a steadfast militant for Armenian statehood who was confined to Soviet labor camps for 17 years for his unbending views.

A total of five men, most of whom, including Ter-Petrosyan, were imprisoned at one time or another for voicing nationalist or anti-Soviet views, are seeking the five-year post.

“Each of them really has the same goal--to make Armenia flower,” Emi Galyan, 22, an engineering student, said in admiration. “We are lucky to have such a choice.”

Like Gazaryan, Galyan honored the pro-independence drive waged over the years by Airikyan, but thought the agitator-hero of yesteryear would be ill-suited to govern. “He makes a good leader for a party, but what we need now is a leader for a nation,” Galyan said.

As he cast his ballot with his wife, Ludmila, Ter-Petrosyan called the institution of a presidential form of government another crucial step in the re-establishment of national sovereignty. As Armenia’s top political figure, he led the campaign that resulted in a resounding 99% vote for independence in a referendum last month.

“Whoever is elected, this day must be considered the most democratic in the history of our people and be recognized as the day on which the highest wishes of our people were fulfilled,” Ter-Petrosyan told reporters at his polling station, a hospital in the Armenian capital once reserved for the Communist Party’s upper-crust.

A pre-election poll gave Ter-Petrosyan a walloping 72% of the vote in Yerevan, a city of 1.3 million where a third of Armenia’s population lives. Airikyan, the leader of the radical opposition Union for National Self-Determination and a member of the republic’s legislature, was a distant second with 11% in the survey.

Airikyan, who was banished from the Soviet Union in 1988 and allowed to return only last year, said after he voted that a victory by Ter-Petrosyan “would be a continuation of the post-Communist regime” that might lead to one-man rule, as in neighboring Georgia.

Much more radical on the issue of how to bring about genuine independence, Airikyan wants Armenia to rapidly create its own armed forces, a move Ter-Petrosyan has eschewed as unnecessary and costly.

At a campaign rally Monday, Airikyan contended that Ter-Petrosyan’s “conciliatory” stance toward Moscow and Azerbaijan, Armenia’s foe in a long-running territorial dispute, has done nothing to ease the republic’s economic and social problems.

During his period of imposed exile abroad, Airikyan lived in Glendale. His wife and three children have refused to return to Armenia with him, and that additional sorrow in a life that has known much hardship only increases the respect many of his countrymen feel for him.

“He has shown he is ready to give his entire life for his people, for the freedom of Armenia,” Vartan Dzhangulyan, 40, a plumber, said.

Although adamant that Armenia should not sign a political pact with Moscow that would hobble its independence, Ter-Petrosyan believes an economic accord between the members of the former Soviet Union is vital to ensure that the economy of his resource-poor land does not collapse.

At the polling station, he made it clear his beliefs are unshaken. Asked if Armenia is ready to sign an agreement to create a Common Market-style economic community, Ter-Petrosyan replied, “Yes, according to all appearances, but with some reservation.”

A political agreement, he said, is out of the question.

Also running were Sos Sarkisyan, 62, a movie actor and candidate of the revived Armenian Revolutionary, or Dashnak Party, which battled the Bolsheviks in the early days of Communist rule; Ashot Navasardyan, 41, a three-time political prisoner who chairs the Armenian Republican Party, and physicist and mathematician Rafael Kazaryan, 67, a member of the Armenian legislature’s presidium, who said he became a candidate “so the people would not be asked to pick from only one watermelon.”

The public opinion polls estimated that the three latter candidates would attract only 17% of the vote among them.

Turnout was reported heavy with 67% of eligible voters casting ballots, according to preliminary results released by the republic’s election commission. First returns for the republic are not expected until some time tonight.

The ballot in blue ink on flimsy paper offered yet another choice--Zori Balayan, a member of the Soviet Parliament from the predominantly Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh district that Armenia and Azerbaijan have feuded over for almost four years. But Balayan withdrew his candidacy earlier to protest the way in which Armenia’s top officials in charge of elections had been chosen.