Last tsar leads Stalin in poll on greatest Russian (Reuters)

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Ninety years after Bolshevik revolutionaries shot dead the last tsar, Russians are fighting over who to lionise: Tsar Nicholas II or Josef Stalin.

They are vying for first place in an online poll organised by Russian television to choose the greatest hero in the country's history. Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin is third.

By Friday lunchtime, the last tsar led the survey with 419,476 votes, followed by Stalin with 381,361 and Lenin with 201,285. Some 2.8 million votes had been registered.

Russia's penchant for strong leaders is evident in the poll. Tsars Peter I and Catherine the Great feature in the top 10, along with crusading mediaeval prince Alexander Nevsky. Ivan the Terrible, who murdered his own son, is in 12th place.

Stalin, blamed by historians for 20 to 40 million deaths in political purges and agricultural famines during his 31-year rule, is popular with some Russians for defeating Nazi Germany, industrialising the Soviet Union and building a strong state.

The poll may not be all it seems. Alexander Lyubimov, the contest's organiser, has openly encouraged online groups to form and campaign for particular candidates. The contest website www.nameofrussia.ru encourages participants to vote as many times as they like for any of the 50 candidates.

"What is happening on the Internet is entertainment, and that's beyond my scientific responsibility," said Efim Galitskiy, a sociologist at the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), a pollster which oversaw an earlier stage of the contest.

When Lyubimov noticed Stalin surging into the lead, apparently after the opposition Communist party encouraged its members to vote for him, he decided to organise what he called a "flash mob" online in support of the last tsar.

A flash mob is a large group which assembles quickly, performs an unusual act and then suddenly disperses again.

HACKER ATTACKS

The contest began when state television channel "Rossiya" released in May a list of 500 significant Russians and asked FOM to whittle the names down to the 50 most influential, using private polling. Stalin and Lenin figured second and third.

"Peter the Great was first, but that list was research, conducted in people's homes across Russia," Galitskiy said.

In June "Rossiya" opened voting online at www.nameofrussia.ru to narrow the 50 to 12 for September's broadcast. Within days Stalin jumped into the lead.

Some cultural giants appear in the top 20, but with much lower votes than those of Stalin, Lenin or the last tsar.

Nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin's 126,600 votes put him in sixth place and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, is eighth with 112,400. Composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky trails in 22nd place with just 19,700 votes.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the former president, is excluded because he is still alive. So is the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Nicholas II, caricatured in Soviet times as the face of imperial Russia and symbol of its social inequalities, has become for many Russians a martyr and symbol of lost glory. The Bolsheviks shot Nicholas II and his family in July 1918.

(Editing by Michael Stott and Timothy Heritage)

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