By Natalya Shurmina

YEKATERINBURG, Russia, Apr 25 (Reuters) Admirers of Boris Yeltsin today said they wanted to honour Russia's first president by changing the name of his home town's main street from Lenin to Yeltsin.

Lenin street, a main thoroughfare in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, was named after Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state Yeltsin played a key role in dismantling. It was one of many avenues and towns renamed after Bolshevik leaders.

But in a revival of that Soviet-era tradition, a group of local journalists said they had the backing of local authorities and started collecting signatures for a petition to rename the street in honour of the former president who died on Monday.

''The decision to rename the street is in our hands,'' their statement said. ''We do not demand the demolition of Lenin's monument, but we acknowledge that Yeltsin has more links to Yekaterinburg and has stronger rights to be commemorated.'' Born in 1931 in a village of Butka near Yekaterinburg, Yeltsin studied in a local polytechnic college to become an engineer and later a Communist party apparatchik. He was a regional party boss in Yekaterinburg in 1976-85.

Regional leaders, who were attending Yeltsin's funeral in Moscow, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Yeltsin, who died of heart failure, is the first Russian national leader to die since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and many elements of the official reaction to his death are likely to become a precedent.

As the Russian leader, Yeltsin did much to return pre-Soviet names to dozens of cities, towns and streets.

In the Soviet Union, Yekaterinburg was known as Sverdlovsk, a reference to Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov who in 1918 gave the go-ahead for the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in the city.

Yeltsin, credited for introducing liberal freedoms in post-Soviet Russia, became a hate figure for millions of Russians who were impoverished by his market reforms.

''There were years when we were ashamed of being from the same place as the first president and when our sentiments were confused,'' their statement said. ''There were times when renaming was ruled out for the fear of reviving the personality cult.'' ''We should forget about this today,'' it added. ''Yeltsin has done much for the country and even more for Yekaterinburg.'' REUTERS ABM HT1652