By CLIFFORD J.LEVY

MOSCOW - Roman Malinovsky had been saving his salary at his local bank to pay for graduate school in Germany. Yelena Samoilova, a supervisor at a publishing house, was saving at the same branch to buy a Ford Focus. Olga Sudakova, who was a little embarrassed to be living with her parents at age 33, almost had enough money in her account there for a down payment on an apartment.

They were part of the new middle class in Moscow, confident that with Russia’s economic revival and with the government’s guarantees they could rely on the banking system, no matter its troubled history. But when they went to the small bank on Kalanchyovskaya Street to retrieve their money over the past two months, they got a shock that made them question whether life here had truly changed.

“They said,‘There’s no money,’”said Mr.Malinovsky, 26, who had about $3,500 at the bank, Capital Credit.“‘There is no cash.’That is how they explained it.”

What happened next offered a glimpse into the kind of public discontent that could grow in Russia as the financial crisis deepens here. Capital Credit’s depositors, who for the most part had never before agitated against the government, began doing just that.

“The government made promises to us,”Ms.Samoilova, 25, said.“The president every day went on television and told us that our deposits are insured, that people should put money in banks. In truth, the situation is not like the one they have portrayed.”

A depositor named Denis Davydov, 30, who works for the railway system, took the lead. He used the Internet to find others with similar grievances against the bank. They called politicians and circulated petitions demanding that Russia’s central bank revoke Capital Credit’s license, thereby making the depositors eligible for government insurance so they could recover at least some of their money.

Post-Soviet Russia has a history of bank runs and other financial tribulations that have often badly shaken the public’s faith. With the current financial crisis, the Russian government has allocated billions of dollars in an effort to shore up the banking system. Still, the depositors at Capital Credit felt forgotten.

For weeks, the central bank ignored their pleas, as did Capital Credit. Many depositors, to no avail, went every few days to the Capital Credit branch to seek information.

“They always said that the executives of the bank had left for the day, or were in a meeting, or just could not talk,”Mr.Davydov said.

The depositors instead were instructed to go to a small basement room in the branch to fill out paperwork about their accounts. Many depositors said they later received calls indicating that their money was available. Some did receive it. But others showed up at the branch and were told that there had been a mistake.

“We very much fear that the management of the bank is gone, that they have gone abroad with our money,”said Ms.Sudakova, who manages a translation service and had about $35,500 in the bank. Frustrated, the depositors took to the streets.

They held a protest in December in front of the bank, waving banners demanding that federal regulators do something. Another slogan,“1998 = 2008?,”referred to Russia’s financial crisis of 1998, when the government defaulted on its debt, banks failed, the ruble was sharply devalued and many Russians lost everything.

The analogy is provocative because the Kremlin under Vladimir V.Putin has positioned itself as having rescued the country from the disorder of that era. Just recently, President Dmitri A.Medvedev assured the public “there is no cause for alarm or hysteria.”

Still, some depositors said they feared that it would take many weeks of slogging through the bureaucracy to get the money. Whatever happens, they said, their trust in the government and the banks was shaken.

“This really reminds us of the 1990s,”Ms.Sudakova said.“The situation really scares us. I have always believed in our government and our authorities. I very much loved our president. I believed in him. Now I don’t. I just fear for the future.”