A Noble Cause in Soviet Union : Royalty: Amid modest pomp and a friendlier political climate, the remnants of Old Russia’s nobility are coming forward with dreams of reviving their traditions and social standing.

Their ancestors were dashing princes and graceful duchesses, aristocrats from France, Prussia and Sweden, scions of the noble houses of Old Russia. They lived among gilt, marble and mirrors, waltzing in satin and jewels, attended by dozens of servants on palatial estates.

Then came the upheaval of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, when blue blood came to mean death and persecution for hundreds of thousands caught under proletariat rule and hiding one’s family roots often became the only way to survive.

Now, with some modest pomp and a flourish of the old czarist flag of white, red and blue, the remnants of Russia’s nobility are coming proudly out into public again, proclaiming their existence and trying to restore the traditions that made their forebears great.

“We have to show the world that we haven’t degenerated and we haven’t been mowed down,” said Igor G. Kugushev, a self-described prince who traces his ancestry to Genghis Khan.

He spoke above the strains of harp music and excited chatter at a unique event on the Soviet capital’s social calendar this fall: the revival of the Dvoryanskoye Sobraniye, the largely symbolic council of noblemen that existed for centuries until Bolshevik authorities disbanded it.

Assembled in the imposing hall just across from the Kremlin, where their grandparents and great-grandparents used to gather, about 400 nobles received a priest’s blessing on the revival of their social class and heard encouraging words from Andrei K. Golitsyn, son of one of Russia’s most celebrated families.

Their breeding seemed to show through in a certain proud bearing and many a lofty brow.

“The certainty in our hearts survived (so) the tie between generations would not be ripped apart, that it would be restored,” Golitsyn, a soft-spoken, somewhat melancholy artist with deep-set eyes and a silver beard, told the assembly.

A hereditary prince, Golitsyn is head of the “Union of Descendants of the Russian Nobility,” which, with a burgeoning membership of more than 1,000, is becoming the rallying point for the nobility’s re-emergence.

On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, the union holds the equivalent of old-style “at-homes” in a former church just off Red Square.

For all the Kremlin’s reforms of the last five years, it still sounds unutterably strange to hear citizens who so recently addressed others as “Comrade” greeting each other with hereditary titles in the heart of the capital of Communism.

“Count! How nice to see you!”

“Welcome, Prince. How are things?”

The union plans to restore churches, arrange exhibits and run charities, but much of its work so far consists of simply registering people who claim to be descendants of the 400,000 noble families that existed before the revolution and documenting their lineage.

A complex aristocracy evolved over three centuries in the Russian empire as it absorbed surrounding states and granted the status of nobility to high-born Poles, Germans, Tatars and others in return for loyalty to the czar. Russian czars and princes often took French or Prussian brides. And senior government officials and local landowners often were rewarded with non-hereditary titles.

The union’s careful listing of noble families hints of plans to begin trying to reclaim the estates and possessions confiscated by the Bolsheviks, but Vadim O. Lopukhin, one of the union’s directors, maintained that the “property question” was not on the agenda yet.

“We aren’t making property claims, we have no thirst for revenge and no feelings of superiority,” Lopukhin said. “People come to us and say, ‘Can’t we get something back?’ And we tell them it’s premature.”

The union also is striving for caution on the issue of restoring the Russian monarchy, which appeared ended for good when Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Monarchist groups, while still small in numbers, are making their presence felt on the Soviet political scene, playing on the growing popular nostalgia for the rosy old days of Russian royal grandeur.

Lopukhin, whose family name can be found in many a history book, said the union generally sees the idea of a renewed monarchy as “desirable” but is not yet willing to take a stand on it. Vladimir Kirillovich Romanov, the generally acknowledged rightful heir to the throne, is in his 70s, childless and living in Paris.

Despite nobles’ repeated assertions that they are not trying to make themselves out as better than anyone else, a strain of purely genetic pride runs through their pronouncements.

“We exist as a strong, healthy gene pool,” said Kugushev, the Genghis Khan descendant.

Lopukhin, when pressed, acknowledged that the union was aiming to create an active youth group in part because it hoped to bring together potential spouses and their noble bloodlines.

“We will encourage marriages. Seventy years is enough mixing” with commoner stock, he said.

For Golitsyn, however, nobility has less to do with the family tree than with the basic concepts of honor and civilized behavior that flourished among aristocrats, requiring everything from piety, sobriety and depth of learning to good table manners.

His goal, Golitsyn said, is to instill a sense of morality in the coming generation of young nobles, “so that they feel themselves linked with past generations and judge their actions by what their grandfathers would have thought of them.”

It is not the balls and estates that Golitsyn wants to bring back, either.

“This is not a question of some masquerade restoration,” he said. “Only the resurrection of morality can bring about the rebirth of this country.”

Too many years have passed since their families’ past grandeur for today’s Soviet-raised nobles to know much more than secondhand stories of the sumptuous prerevolutionary lifestyle. it was a life that Western observers said often surpassed even that of European aristocrats in its luxury and gaiety.

Instead, they know only a sad tradition of arrests, prison terms and discrimination.

Golitsyn, 58, remembers seeing his father arrested and searched at the beginning of World War II. Kugushev’s uncle was shot in 1937, and his father, who had been expelled from university when his origins became known, fled to the Arctic for years.

“We have been one of the most persecuted of classes,” Golitsyn told the Dvoryanskoye Sobraniye assembly.

Now, however, the nobles, as they reconstitute their ranks, are trying to restore some of their happier traditions.

Golitsyn said the union had received signals from the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, that it would honor the group’s request to make Christmas a holiday this year, and he hoped to bring back the old practice of a Christmas Day procession through Moscow.

The union also is seeking to gather the hundreds of thousands of descendants of Russian nobles now living abroad, mainly in America and France. It has proposed to the legislature of the Russian Federation that it grant automatic Russian citizenship to all those who wish to return.

“The nobility is a necessary part of the rebirth of Russia,” Count Nikolai N. Bobrinsky, a barrel-chested man with mutton-chop whiskers and a set of gold teeth, said during a break at the Dvoryanskoye Sobraniye. “What people has ever gotten along without an aristocracy?”