Rutskoi is urging Russians ever more fervently to reject the policies President Boris Yeltsin has endorsed, although he denies any personal enmity toward the man with whom he swept to power on a joint ticket in Russia's first democratic elections in June 1991.
"He is not campaigning against the president, but for a change in the course of reform", a close aide to Rutskoi, Andrei Fyodorov, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
The vice president spent several hours over the weekend at the popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, answering reader's questions over a hotline. The conversations are to be printed in the newspaper on Tuesday.
On Monday, he took part in a recorded television debate with Russia's reformist former acting prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, on economic reforms. On Tuesday, he was scheduled for another television interview with a group of prominent writers, and on Wednesday he is to appear at a congress of the centrist coalition to which he belongs, Civic Union.
Rutskoi will not be able to take his campaign to the countryside, however, because "he can do that only with the president's permission", Fyodorov said. "The president is not speaking to him".
Rutskoi's stumping comes at a time when the personal feud between himself and Yeltsin appears to have deepened irretrievably.
Last week Yeltsin said he would remove the vice president as head of agricultural reform. Rutskoi's aides also said his armored Mercedes had been taken away from him, together with most of his bodyguards and personal doctor in an apparent attempt to humiliate the vice president.
While Yeltsin's focus in the run up to the referendum has been on the first of the four ballot questions - a vote of confidence in his presidency - Rutskoi is homing in on the second question, which asks Russians whether they support Yeltsin's economic reform policies.
On Saturday he published a page-long article in Rossiiskaya Gazeta - the newspaper of the Russian parliament - warning voters that if they gave the go ahead to fast-paced reforms, the country's wealth would disappear into the hands of "dealers, corrupt bureaucrats, and foreign capital".
He told the daily's readers that they must pay careful attention to the second question on the ballot, because "your answer to this question predetermines your answers to the other questions". The remaining three consist of whether to call early elections for Yeltsin and the legislature, as well as the question on confidence in the Yeltsin's rule.
In a speech on organized crime given to parliament last Friday, the vice president bitterly attacked Yeltsin's government for allegedly sabotaging his efforts to protect the country's economic interests and introduce measures to monitor exports and hard currency flow.
He also accused top members of Yeltsin's team of selling off Russia's national wealth and resources at discount prices.
He blasted Gaidar, former State Secretary Gennady Burbulis, and Deputy Prime Ministers Vladimir Shumeiko and Alexander Shokhin for allegedly selling off state property cheaply. He said he had thousands of pages of documents proving that members of the government had approved illegal sales of gold, oil, and other natural resources.
While the president has not responded directly to the accusations Rutskoi leveled at his aides, presidential press spokesman Anatoly Krasikov said that Yeltsin is committed to "fighting corruption at all levels, no matter how high".
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