More Fun, Less Politics and Fewer Bolsheviks : Holiday: St. Petersburg celebrates Revolution Day with a rock concert, fireworks and a ‘coming-out’ party.

There was something for everyone on Thursday as this historic city marked the 74th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in a style never seen before.

A pitiful band of about 1,000 Communists gathered near the battleship Aurora, famous for its role in the revolution. But their faint cries of “Long live the revolution!” were drowned out by merrymaking elsewhere.

At Palace Square, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak led a mass demonstration in honor of the recent restoration of the original name of the city, which, through most of the Soviet era, was known as Leningrad.

But the joyful atmosphere was interrupted when several hundred demonstrators, radical democrats, marched onto the square holding flags of white, blue and red, the colors of Russia, draped with black ribbons to accuse Sobchak of “dancing on the bones” of the victims of the Bolshevik Revolution and 73 years of Soviet rule that followed.

Revolution Day, 1991, was not what it used to be.

For decades, people here--as in most cities, towns and villages across the Soviet Union--gathered at their workplaces and marched through the city in great columns under red banners proclaiming the glory of socialism.

This year, with the old system discredited in the conservatives’ hapless August coup, few people were inclined to celebrate the revolution that put Communists in power.

Still, Nov. 7 was a legal holiday, and Sobchak decided to throw a “coming-out party” for his city, which he is pushing as Europe’s newest commercial capital.

“Peter the Great established our city to be a window on the West,” Sobchak told the 60,000 who gathered in Palace Square. “Now, after all these years, we are opening not just our windows, but also our doors to the West.”

Sobchak collected 3 million rubles, about $360,000 at the commercial rate of exchange, from corporate sponsors and treated St. Petersburg’s 5 million residents to a rock concert, air show and fireworks.

To capture the spirit of the city’s splendid past, when it was the capital of the czarist empire, Sobchak invited the heir to the Russian throne, Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich Romanov, to visit the city for the first time. Even the name chosen for the celebration reflected the mayor’s desire to bring back the city’s days of glory: “Vivat St. Petersburg!” or “St. Petersburg lives!” which was a favorite phrase of Peter the Great, who founded the city on the Neva River in 1703.

Sobchak also held a gala ball--the likes of which has not been seen since before the revolution--at Tavrichesky Palace, one of the residences of the czars, which the Soviets used for training of Communist Party bureaucrats.

Sobchak dodged criticisms that it was improper to hold a ball in a city where basic foods are rationed: “All the people who are here stand in lines like everyone else--they are not the elite. There are . . . workers, intellectuals, politicians.”

In cities across the Soviet Union, there were rival celebrations--Communists recalling the Bolshevik Revolution and their years of glory and democrats marking the end of Soviet power.

In Moscow, about 10,000 people gathered at October Square and marched through the city center to Red Square, traditionally the site of the anniversary celebration, to denounce the country’s current leadership. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had canceled the usual military parade.

“This will always be a holiday for us,” Natalya I. Kuznetsova, 57, a retired engineer, said, describing herself as still a party member although Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin issued a decree this week dissolving the organization.

In St. Petersburg, the 500 people in the protest on Palace Square mourning the “victims of Soviet rule” were critical of Sobchak. “It is exactly 74 years since the Bolshevik coup took place, leading to decades of oppressive Soviet rule, and we think this day should be mournful,” said Igor I. Soshnikov, 34, a leader of the Free Democratic Party of Russia. “We cannot sing and rejoice on the bones of our countrymen as Sobchak has.”

But many of the people who came to enjoy the festivities at Palace Square were put off that these demonstrators interrupted their merriment with a funeral dirge and gloomy memories.

“I want to be happy,” one woman said, scolding the protesters. “We have enough hardship in our lives. Why do you come here to spoil our fun?”

Andrei Ostroukh, a researcher in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this report.