Dozens of monarchists have held religious processions in Moscow and unveiled a memorial to Tsar Nicholas II, marking the 76th anniversary of the killing of the Russian royal family.


About 100 people, most of them dressed in traditional Cossack gear, prayed outside the main church of the Vagankovskoye cemetery in central Moscow on Sunday after laying flowers at new parts of the first stone cross in honor of the last tsar of Russia.


In a mixed message of bitterness and reconciliation, Yanis Bremzis, an organizer of the event said: "Russians have not forgotten about the evils committed by the Bolsheviks. Let this commemoration appease our hearts."


The memorial, made by the self-taught sculptor Nikolai Pavlov, consists of a white marble cross and several granite plaques honoring the royal family and officers who had attempted to rescue the family but were caught and executed.


Another organizer, Valery Kam-shilov, who leads the Special Joint Cossack Regiment, said the Cossack movement was pressing for the restoration of monarchy because it was historically the task of Cossacks to serve the throne.


By-standers appeared divided over the the issue as a whole.


"It is necessary to do these things, it is our history," said Anatoly Makarov, 60, adding that he did not support the monarchy.


"This is a profanation," said Vladimir Afanasyev, 43. "These people worship something they don't know. If the tsar had been good, the people would have defended him, but they put him against the wall instead."


Nikolai Lukyanov, the leader of the All-Russian Monarchist Center, said his organization and others, held a religious procession from Staraya Ploshchad to the Kazansky cathedral on Red Square on Sunday. In his opinion, Nicholas had been the victim of a Jewish "ritual murder."


The foreign branch of the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the family in 1981.


At the site of the killing, in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg, a crowd also held a service Sunday in a wooden chapel erected two years ago,.


The Ipatev house, in which the tsar and his family are believed to have been shot on 16 July 1918, was pulled down in 1977. President Boris Yeltsin was the local Communist Party boss at the time.