MOSCOW -- Three dozen descendents of the landed gentry, meeting in a bleak room at a Soviet-era trade union hotel, declared Saturday they were restoring the pre-revolution Assembly of Russian Nobility and planned to bring back the monarchy.
The rather grandly named Assembly -- one of a handful of new small monarchist groups springing up in Russia -- began with the blessing of a Russian Orthodox priest and a former KGB general, and then moved to long speeches on how only the monarchy and the nobility could save the country.
'We see our long-term objective in restoration of the Russian monarch's rule in Russia,' said Vladimir Lupandin, head of the Moscow Union of Nobility.
Attempts to maintain the dignity of the gathering were interrupted by lively arguments over who among the royal pretenders should be czar and bickering over whether the head of the nobility union from Moscow or its historic rival St. Petersburg should lead the group. They eventually agreed to allow the St. Petersburg leader to be called assembly co- chairman.
The handful of descendents of Russian noble families came to Moscow from several Russian cities as well as from Ukraine and Estonia, former parts of the Russian Empire, to voice their hopes for a restoration of that empire in all its glory.
Among the invited guests was Gen. Alexander Sterligov, a conservative former KGB official now active in the opposition to Russian President Boris Yeltsin's reformist government.
'Russia's survival lies in Orthdoxy and monarchy, which for decades had been regarded as a sort of a bugbear in this country,' Sterligov said, suggesting that the nobles work with his National Assembly to bring back the empire.
The Assembly of Nobility Unions, a consultative body for the czars before it was destroyed by the Communist victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution, hopes with its restoration to be able to organize a congress of representatives of all historic Russian estates to choose a new czar.
Alexander Kostin, who said he was head of the Military and Foreign Department of the Moscow Nobility Union, said the group supported a return of all Russia's former colonies along with the return to czarist rule.
Just how Russia was to restore its empire a year after the Soviet empire broke apart was left unclear, although Kostin said eventually the former colonies would realize that they too would be better off under a Russian czar.
The descendents of the nobility also declared a more practical aim for themselves: the return of the estates of the noble families and the formation of economic and commercial structures to support the group's members.
The Assembly distanced itself from another Moscow nobility group, the Union Noble Families' Descendants, which has declared it does not intend to get involved in politics and narrowed its tasks to social and cultural matters.
'What they do is just wasting time drinking tea,' scoffed Alexander Kugushev, an official of the Moscow Nobility Union.
The participants Saturday agreed their next step should be an attempt to call a congress of representatives of all Russian estates to discuss candidates to the Russian throne, like historic congresses of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The final decision on a czar, the noble descendents claimed, would be up to their Assembly. They did not explain why they thought their choice of ruler would be accepted by the millions of Russians outside their little conference room.
