ST. PETERSBURG -- Imperial St. Petersburg on Wednesday gave the first British monarch to visit Russia a more stylish welcome than Russia's capital, Moscow.


In the twilit grounds of the tsars' palace at Pushkin, dusted with late autumn snow, the queen and the Duke of Edinburgh watched a procession of guards in imperial uniforms and a firework display.


On the recently renamed Angliiskaya Naberezhnaya, or English Embankment, on the banks of the Neva, a group of 200 onlookers had to be pushed back by police, so eager were they to see the royal yacht Britannia that was moored there.


The queen told an audience of staff and students at St. Petersburg University that she was sorry it had taken so long for a British sovereign to visit Russia's northern capital.


"But if we were not there at the creation I am all the more delighted to be here now, to help mark a new beginning," she said.


A crowd of 400 students cheered and laughed as the queen's Rolls-Royce pulled up at the university gates.


Andrei Belousov, a young monarchist who carried a nationalist white, yellow and black flag and and wore a black beret with a double-headed eagle pinned to it, was there to greet her. But the police pushed him to one side and forced him to take it down.


He said his 50-member Christian Monarchist Union wanted to restore the crown to Maria Romanova, the daughter of the last tsar who he said had survived assassination in 1918.


"A constitutional monarchy is a positive step but its only a start," he said. "We want an authoritarian monarchy."


Nina Strelnikova, a biology lecturer, said she was anxious to see the queen because in the last days of the old regime before the 1917 revolution her mother had often seen Tsar Nicholas II ride by in his carriage. Strelnikova herself said she had seen the Ipatyev house in Yekaterinburg where Nicholas II and his family were murdered. The house was demolished on the orders of Boris Yeltsin when he was the local Communist Party boss. "I'm not a monarchist but I deeply condemn what happened," she said.


The queen addressed herself to a new generation of builders, who she said had the task of reviving Russia's most European city.


She announced the creation of a new scholarship scheme, the Queen's Awards, which will subsidize Russian graduates to come to British universities.


The royal day began in Moscow with a service in St. Andrew's Anglican Church, which has recently been handed back to the British community.


Nationalist demonstrators who had threatened to disrupt proceedings failed to materialize and the only discord was when 3-year-old Dmitri Macmillen had a tug of war with the queen over a bouquet of flowers. He refused to hand them over. Eventually she let him keep them.


Then the queen unveiled a commemorative stone for the new British embassy on Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya. The embassy will relocate there when construction work is completed.


After lunch she flew north to St. Petersburg. Mayor Anatoly Sobchak escorted her around the palace at Pushkin where she saw restoration work and a string quartet played Rachmaninoff. In the evening she attended a concert at another famous landmark, the Yusupov Palace on the Moika.


On Thursday the royal couple will visit the tombs of the tsars and commemorate the wartime alliance between Britain and Russia at Piskaryovskoye cemetery. Later they will entertain President Boris Yeltsin onboard the Royal yacht Britannia at a banquet dinner.