Former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi said on Thursday that more than half a million people had joined his new opposition movement during a recent 12-region tour through Russia.


Rutskoi, looking confident and combative throughout a packed 90-minute press conference -- his first in Moscow since his release from jail in February -- painted an apocalyptic picture of the country and presented himself as the only man to rescue Russia.


"I am bewildered when the North Caucasus is in crisis, the economy is breaking up, the state is in complete chaos and anarchy and yet the president is enjoying tourist trips on the Volga," Rutskoi said, making a slighting reference to President Boris Yeltsin's working trip down the Volga that began Thursday.


Rutskoi said he had just returned from a trip through 12 regions in central Russia whipping up support for his new party, called Derzhava or Great Power. He said he had been given an overwhelmingly positive response and in just nine of the 12 regions 562,000 people had applied to join.


Rutskoi said his movement was "not inside the Garden Ring, but one which comes from the provinces." And he was contemptuous of the mainstream opposition to Yeltsin saying: "We don't have any opposition. It reminds one more than anything of a farcical show."


The ex-vice-president's press secretary, Andrei Fyodorov, added that Rutskoi would be embarking on a new two-month tour of Russia in the new future.


Rutskoi returned again and again to his main theme, the events of last Oct. 3-4, when he and other leaders of the parliament uprising were bombarded in the White House and ended up in prison.


The fiery former air force general said he wanted to bring charges against those who ordered tanks to fire on the parliament building.


While the official death total for the October violence was 147, Rutskoi said that "way beyond 500 people" had died during the storming of the White House. He called the climax the "crime of the century."