President Boris Yeltsin's former corruption-fighter Yury Boldyrev has stepped up his campaign against official abuse of power, alleging in a newspaper interview that the pro-Yeltsin Russia's Choice electoral bloc was financed by an illegally funded organization.


In an interview given to Izvestia for Friday's edition, Boldyrev, who has been leading the campaign for the truth to be revealed in the scandal surrounding the Western Group of Forces, lashed out at Yeltsin's administration for being accountable to no one and flouting its own laws.


"Why was blood spilt a year ago?" he asked rhetorically. "For the victory of democracy or for the concentration of complete uncontrolled power in the same hands?"


Boldyrev said that in 1992, when Yegor Gaidar was prime minister the government illegally gave the organization AKKOR the right "without any obligations or control mechanisms" to allocate government money to farmers.


He said that with great difficulty his corruption inspectorate won the right to check AKKOR and discovered "evidence of large-scale misdirection of funds." He had then reported back to Yeltsin, recommending that the company give up its monopoly or re-direct it through official channels. But nothing was done.


Later on, Boldyrev said, "the ministers who had given this public organization the chance to get rich on taxpayers' money, founded the well-known political bloc Russia's Choice together with the organization itself. Do I have to name their names?"


The founder of Russia's Choice was Gaidar, the man whose government had authorized the first decision to give funds to AKKOR.


Boldyrev is a deputy in the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council. During the elections last December he helped form the political bloc Yabloko with Grigory Yavlinsky, providing the letter "B" in the name.


He was sacked as the president's chief corruption inspector in 1993.