Feuding king-lovers await the Queen

JUST OVER a week before the Queen begins a historic visit to Russia, a conference of Russian monarchists has broken up in chaos with a shoot-out between feuding tsarists.

The fight broke out late on Friday in the canteen of the chandeliered ballroom of the Hall of Columns in central Moscow. Witnesses said Orthodox priests in long black robes had to separate members of the Black Hundred and the Union of Peasant Renaissance, militant right-wing groups on the fringe of Russia's monarchist movement.

A drunken brawl escalated out of control and several shots were fired from gas pistols. Police were called but no serious injuries were reported.

The incident forced the cancellation of a church service to mark the end of the All-Russia Monarchist Conference, the biggest gathering of its kind since the last tsar, Nicholas II, was murdered in 1918.

He was a distant cousin of the Queen, whose four-day state visit to Moscow and St Petersburg, starting next Monday, will be the first by a reigning British monarch. Russian monarchists are divided over the visit, with some still angry that George V did so little to help his friend and relative, Tsar Nicholas.

The most contentious issue among Russia's argumentative tsarists, though, is who should sit on a new Russian throne. Some groups pulled out of the meeting, saying it had been hijacked by anti-Semitic extremists. 'These are not monarchists but hooligans. They all hate each other,' said Alexander Zakatov, secretary- general of the Russian Christian-Monarchy Union, which supports the claims of Grand Duke Georgy Mikhailovich, a pudgy Madrid schoolboy. Other claimants to the Romanov throne include Prince Alexis II d'Anjou de Bourbon-Conde Romanov-Dolgoruky, also living in Spain, and a Muscovite who has proclaimed himself Tsar Nicholas III.

The campaign to revive Russia's monarchy has attracted growing support from the Russian Orthodox Church, which wants to canonise Nicholas II, and, perhaps surprisingly, enthusiastic interest from the Russian Communist Party, whose leader, Gennady Zyuganov, attended the conference on its opening day.

The cause is handicapped, however, by fierce rivalries. Tempers frayed further last week after news from London that DNA tests had proved the late Anna Anderson not to be the last tsar's daughter, Anastasia, as she claimed throughout her life.

The mounting evidence that all of Nicholas and Alexandra's five children died in 1918 undermined the claims of a plethora of would-be tsars.

(Photograph omitted)