Russian riot police detained around 500 nationalist protesters, some making Nazi salutes and shouting "Heil Hitler", after they tried to join an unauthorised demonstration in Moscow yesterday.

Disturbances also broke out at nationalist marches elsewhere in Russia on a national holiday following what human rights groups say are growing problems with racism.

Several hundred youths, some wearing surgical masks and shouting "Russia for Russians" and "Forward, Russia!", turned up in Moscow for a march organised by the Russian Movement against Illegal Immigration and another group.

Scuffles broke out when riot police blocked their way and moved in to make arrests.

"At the moment all protests have ended," a spokesman for Moscow's police, Viktor Biryukov, told the Interfax news agency.

"Over the day around 500 people have been detained in the city. They were basically participants in unauthorised protests."

The organisers said on their website www.rusmarsh.org they had tried to march towards Red Square, next to the Kremlin.

Seventeen people were also arrested after a fight broke out between about 50 youths in a park in Solnechnogorsk, near Moscow, Interfax quoted local police sources as saying.

It said police confiscated stun guns, knives and bats in the clashes between local youths and people from the Caucasian regions such as Chechnya, Dagestan, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

The Moscow Human Rights Bureau reported a rise in racist crimes in the first 10 months of this year, with 113 people killed and 340 wounded. This was a 50 per cent rise from the 2007 figure, Interfax quoted the Bureau's director as saying. At around 7 p.m. yesterday five or six skinheads shouting nationalist slogans stabbed and killed an Uzbek street cleaner in western Moscow, a police source told Interfax.

The police source did not link the attackers to the protests earlier in the day.