Politics makes strange bedfellows. But an odder pair than human rights activist Yelena Bonner and maverick politician Konstantin Borovoi would be hard to imagine. The two teamed up with other floggers of the public conscience at a press conference Tuesday to defend the rights of entrepreneurs, and to warn that the bad old days are far from over.


"No one is safe," said Valery Abramkin, adviser to the president's commission on human rights, who spent six years in prison for "anti-Soviet" activity. "Today's gulag differs little from the Soviet one."


The press conference was held to publicize the plight of those who have been arrested for economic crimes since the president's decree on measures to deal with organized crime granted the police sweeping powers in June.


But the rhetoric at times outstripped the logic, as participants accused the police of old-style state terrorism combined with new-style economic corruption.


"These are people from the past, using old methods," said Bonner, chairman of the Sakharov Fund, set up to continue the work of her husband, the late Andrei Sakharov.


"The police are part of organized crime," said Konstantin Borovoi, chairman of the Party of Economic Freedom, who is running for a Duma seat in by-elections to be held Oct. 30. "Of that there cannot be the slightest doubt."


Borovoi stated that the well-publicized collapse of the MMM investment company was the work of the state security apparatus, as was the negative publicity surrounding the Tibet firm.


"They see entrepreneurs as ideological rivals to the state," he said. "They are just getting rid of the competition."


Borovoi did not offer any solid evidence for his assertions.


Amid the loud sloganeering, some of the more moderate voices were lost. Viktor Sokirko, chairman of the Society for the Defense of Prisoners' Rights, estimates that the number of those who have been wrongfully imprisoned is in the thousands, although exact figures are not available.


"Some cases are publicized, then the noise dies down," he said. "In the meantime, people are rotting in jail."


There was a mood of something akin to nostalgia among some of the conferees as they tried to whip up the moral frenzy of earlier day.