Russia Vice President Hits Back at Accusers : Politics: Rutskoi says he has been the target of ‘slander and falsification,’ calls foes corrupt. He brandishes documents he says show rot in Yeltsin’s government.

MOSCOW —  Using the same tactics as enemies who accuse him of being on the take, Russian Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi on Monday brandished documents he said prove that his foes, and not he, are corrupt or anti-democratic.

“I can tell you that these accusations are all groundless,” the mustachioed vice president said at a press conference he called inside the Kremlin.

Last Wednesday, Rutskoi, President Boris N. Yeltsin’s former running mate who now opposes him, was accused by a government anti-corruption commission of having stashed away a fortune in embezzled state funds in a Swiss bank account. But Monday, Rutskoi replied, “I have no property abroad.”

Saying he had been the target of “slander and falsification” from a band of Yeltsin loyalists, Rutskoi then went on the offensive, opening a blue folder and reading for journalists and the TV cameras what he said were internal government documents and letters chronicling the rot inside the Yeltsin administration.

Pressed for the name of an informant, Rutskoi refused to provide one. Asked whether he wasn’t doing precisely what his chief accuser, lawyer Andrei M. Makarov, did last Wednesday--and what Sen. Joseph McCarthy did during his Communist witch hunts in the United States--Rutskoi said: “These aren’t rumors. I’m a state official, the vice president. Makarov isn’t.”

Rutskoi’s camera-tempting gambit stirred an already churning pot of political intrigue and skulduggery by Yeltsin allies and opponents. Observers agree that the situation will worsen this autumn, when the president wants to hold early elections to replace a hostile, conservative-led Parliament.

On Sunday, in a still mysterious incident, gunfire damaged the downtown building where Information Minister Mikhail A. Fedotov, who tendered his resignation last week because he says lawmakers are out to muzzle the media, has his offices.

Russia’s top foreign trade official, Sergei Y. Glazyev, sent in his resignation letter Saturday, accusing Justice Minister Yuri K. Kalmykov and First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir F. Shumeiko, who is being investigated for corruption himself, of hounding him from office.

In a passage from his letter quoted by Rutskoi, Glazyev said he had been on the point of clamping tough controls on raw materials exports--a field where billions worth of goods have mysteriously disappeared--and that “Mafia structures” had declared war on him.

More shake-ups are apparently coming in a government hamstrung by the struggle for power between Yeltsin and his enemies, in which charges and countercharges of outrageous unethical conduct have become a predictable part of politics.

“We are now deciding what to do with a number of ministers,” Alexei Ilyushenko, head of the presidential administration’s control department, told the Itar-Tass news agency over the weekend. “Corruption has penetrated into the top echelons of power, and if the situation remains unchanged, the state itself will become criminal.”

Rutskoi said the government is already unsalvageably corrupt and is willfully violating the law. He quoted from what he said was a document penned by former Justice Minister Nikolai V. Fyodorov, who complained that “in spite of paying lip service to a law-governed state, in fact the president has increasingly taken his cue from those who advised him to squash his political enemies, to throw a strong noose over the necks of those who have resisted him and, in effect, to open the floodgates for reprisals.”

Rutskoi, 45, a former Soviet air force flier who makes no secret of his ambition to succeed Yeltsin, called for early elections for Parliament and president.