Russians battle for tsar's basilica

Tsar Nicholas II

FRANCE - A row has broken out over one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe, pitching descendants of White Russians who fled Lenin against the new Russia of Vladimir Putin.

Folk memories of the Soviet revolution have mingled with revulsion for Russia's instant millionaires who are among descendants of Russian exiles living in Nice.

The Russian Federation has launched a legal battle to claim ownership of the Cathedral of St Nicholas, the Russian Orthodox basilica in Nice. It is a copy of St Basil's alongside the Kremlin.

Its five gleaming onion domes rise up more than 50m above the street where it was built on land bought by one of the last of the tsars, Alexander II.

In 1867 he vowed to build a chapel on the site where his son Nicholas died at 21.

For nearly a century, emigres have worshipped within its mighty red walls, among them White Russians who fled to Western Europe after the 1917 revolution, and their descendants. Many have bequeathed artefacts to the church.

Shock, followed by anger, is reverberating across the Nice community after the Russian Federation filed a suit asserting its ownership over the building and its prime land.

Many see it as a naked land-grab by Moscow and some suspect behind-the-scenes pressure by Russian gangsters and tycoons who have made the Riviera their playground.

"The inheritors of the [Soviet] torturers want to seize the patrimony of Russian emigres," says Alexis Obolensky, vice-president of the association of local worshippers, which says it owns the cathedral.

"The few belongings that they were able to take out of Russia were given to embellish this place of worship. Russia has no grounds for seizing them."

Nice lawyer Pierre Bardi, who is acting for Moscow, says the property was leased to the association by Tsar Nicholas II in 1908.

The imperial family's assets were seized by the Soviet state in 1917. They in turn were taken over by the state of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As a result, Russia has the right to reclaim the cathedral after the 99-year lease runs out in 2008, he says.

On February 7, Russia got a Nice court to authorise a bailiff to go to the cathedral to draw up an inventory of the property, but the priests slammed the door in the bailiff's face.

Their leader, Archbishop Gabriel, who heads the Russian Orthodox Parishes of Western Europe, went on the attack, mustering support among politicians and hosting a protest service in the cathedral.

The association has launched a legal counter-strike, claiming it was given the cathedral in perpetuity in the 1920s by the representative in France of the Russian Orthodox Church. It has asked a Nice court to halt the inventory process.

After the 1917 revolution, Russian emigres in Western Europe turned their back on the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox religion, despising it as a tool of the Soviet state, and aligned themselves with a minority hub of the faith, the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The bitterness over the cathedral has stirred suspicions towards the Moscow religious hierarchy.

Yet the row has also exposed an emigre culture that, after nearly 90 years, is fading. The emigres are now in their third or fourth generation, and many are more French than Russian, with only folk memories of the old country, tinged by the persecution of the Soviets, that they learnt at their parents' knees.