RUSSIAN President Boris Yeltsin last night bit the hand that fed him.
Leaving the royal yacht Britannia after saying farewell to the Queen
who had entertained him to a banquet, he was asked as he wove his way
down the red carpet back to dry land how he had enjoyed the meal.
''Russian food is better,'' he replied. It seems that the royal taste
of Scotland provided by the Queen had not appealed to him.
The first course was Glamis salmon -- the fish had been caught on the
royal estates on the River Dee -- and the second course was roast saddle
of Balmoral venison.
The Queen was said to have wanted to give her Russian guests food from
her Scottish estates.
She did not have much luck either with the food served at the
reception given to the guests not invited to dinner.
One of them, leaning over Britannia's rail waiting for the Royal
Marine band to Beat Retreat, was asked about the food. ''You won't envy
us. We get better food at home,'' he said.
But it was otherwise sweetness and light as the Queen in a tiara, her
ballgown covered by a long, black, floor-length fur coat, said goodbye
and fireworks erupted behind the Britannia.
She arrives in Finland today where she will have tea with the
President before returning to London. Manchester may not be such a nice
place in the Queen's opinion but clearly Scottish food is regarded in
much the same way by President Yeltsin.
Earlier yesterday, the Quenn and President Yeltsin marked the new
relationship between Britain and Russia by laying wreaths at the
memorial in the Piskarevskoye cemetery, in which many of the 650,000
people who died during the siege of Leningrad, which lasted for three
years until January 1944, are buried.
The sun shone on the mass graves lightly scattered with snow as the
Queen and President, preceded by goose-stepping Russian soldiers
carrying his wreath of red and white flowers and ratings from HMS
Glasgow carrying her wreath of poppies, walked slowly between the long
line of graves.
To their right lay the graves in which the civilians are buried, to
the left those in which lie the Russian soldiers who defended the city
against the Germans.
It is a long walk which ends at a statue of a woman representing the
Motherland.
They watched as their wreaths were placed at the foot of the plinth on
which the statue stands and the band played the national anthems of both
countries. It was a solemn moment and a moving one.
However, all was not solemnity. After the wreath-laying ceremony was
over, the Queen and the President walked behind the statue where
veterans from the Russian army and British veterans of the Arctic
convoys, wearing their medals, were lined up.
There was one Scot, Mr Hugh Noble, 70, an Aberdonian, who made a trip
to Murmansk in 1943 on Fort Bellingham, a liberty ship. Once had been
enough, he said. Mr Noble was wearing Highland dress and his kilt was a
Hunting Mackintosh.
''You are Scottish,'' said the Queen, spotting him in the line-up. Mr
Noble said he was and told her the weather was like a summer's day in
Aberdeen. ''A bit colder,'' said the Queen, who was wearing her mink
coat and, most unusually, a pair of black Avenger-style boots which went
above the knee and had platform soles.
The veterans did not appear affected by the bitter cold and had left
their coats behind. All was revealed later. They had come well equipped
with hip flasks full of whisky. Asked what they intended to do when they
go to Murmansk this weekend for further celebrations, they chorused:
''Vodka, vodka, vodka''.
Earlier, the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh visited the cathedral of
Saints Peter and Paul where all the tsars from Peter the Great to
Alexander III, father of Nicholas II, the last Romanov, are buried.
The Russians are planning to bury the remains of Nicholas II and his
family, executed by the communists in 1917, somewhere in the cathedral
next year.
The Queen was told this but asked no questions about their plans and
neither she nor the Duke will return for that ceremony. It is even
doubtful whether a member of the royal family will be present despite
the fact Nicholas II was a relation. It is a question which has haunted
this visit.
The Queen was interested, however, in the tombs of Peter the Great and
of Alexander III. Yesterday she was not at her most animated, although
the palace insisted this had nothing to do with the reaction in Britain
to her remarks made on Wednesday about Manchester being not such a nice
place. ''Not even a minor distraction,'' was how an official put it.
The visit to St Petersburg has been marked by the fact that at last
she is managing to meet the Russian people. The crowds have been larger
than in Moscow and when she and the Duke toured the Hermitage Museum
housed in the Winter Palace, school parties and groups of tourists were
going round at the same time.
The museum's director, Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky, said the Duke had
been particularly interested in Catherine the Great's carriage, a gilt
affair of considerable splendour, and had pointed out details of its
construction to the Queen. Being frequent carriage travellers, they are
obviously experts on suspension.
He said the Queen had been delighted to find on display some
watercolours by British and Russian artists she had given as a present
to Mr Klim Voroshilov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, when he visited
London in 1956.
The palace said she had given them to Mr Bulganin and Mr Kruschev when
they visited London.
When she left, she was presented with two volumes of a new history of
the contents of the Hermitage published in London. She also signed the
visitors book.
They was a slight hiccup when Russian television crews told the Duke,
who was watching her, to get out of their way. However, he obliged and
also signed the book. The last person to sign it was former US president
Jimmy Carter who was here in September.
The Queen's state visit had come at the right time, Foreign Secretary
Douglas Hurd said last night in a BBC television interview recorded
after the wreath-laying ceremony at the cemetery. He said we had just
seen the old partnership of the war years.
''Now there is a new partnership of businessmen, of expert
professional people, and also governments. The kind of conversations
John Major had with Mr Yeltsin at Chequers and the kind I had yesterday
in Moscow would have been inconceivable even a couple of years ago. From
now on they are going to be normal.''
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