When Communist legislators in the lower house of the Russian Parliament threatened last week to try to impeach President Boris N. Yeltsin -- bedridden with double pneumonia -- on charges of absenteeism, even some of their own party members blushed. After all, the legislators themselves, Communist and otherwise, often don't bother to show up for important business. In fact, there have been key votes when the speaker of the Duma and all six of his deputies were absent, leaving Anatoly Lukyanov, the hard-line Communist who supported the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, in charge.
Voting by proxy is common practice as legislators, in violation of the rules, hand over their electronic voting cards to colleagues. Add to this all-night office parties, widespread corruption, blatant abuse of office perks, fistfights on the Duma floor and a serene confidence in the superiority of the male sex, and you have Russian Men Behaving Badly -- with parliamentary immunity.

As a legislative body, the 450-member Duma operates as the id of the fledgling Russian democracy along with the upper house of parliament has virtually little power to shape or alter the president's agenda. But as an institution, the Russian Duma is a happy little world free of political correctness, rules of sexual conduct, or ethics investigations.

Sergei Semyonov, an ultranationalist member of the Duma from Saransk who is deputy chairman of the committee on women, families and youth, lives with three women, and recently proposed a bill to legalize polygamy -- because, he says, there aren't enough sober and gainfully employed Russian men to go around. "The majority of Russian men are too poor to support one family, let alone several," Semyonov, who is 22, boasted to reporters. "I have the money and energy to keep all my women fully satisfied, materially and physically."

By the ever-sliding standards of the Russian Duma, Semyonov is a polished gentleman. For example, the leader of his party, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, got into a fistfight on the chamber floor in 1995 and punched Yevgeniya Tishkovskaya (one of 45 women in the Duma) in the face. Later, he explained with a leer that he was fending off her sexual advances.

All-night office parties are far from unusual. One night of Duma debauchery got so out of hand that human excrement was found smeared on one of the walls of the Duma building.

No one has been fined, or hauled in front of the subcommittee on ethics, which exists but has almost never sanctioned a member of parliament. And that could be one reason their counterparts in Europe and the United States might, at times, feel a little envious.

In the Duma, former Rep. Robert K. Dornan, who was tossed out in November in favor of a woman by the voters in his California district, would not have raised a single eyebrow with his denunciation of "lesbian spear-chuckers."

Former Sen. Bob Packwood would not be shunned in Russia; he would be asked for dating tips by awestruck Russian colleagues.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich, among many others, would never have to sweat out an ethics hearing in the Russian Duma -- the notion that a legislator should not use tax-exempt funds for his own political purposes is nonsensical here.

"There are no financial scandals in the Duma, because nobody even tries to hide their conflicts of interest," explained Dmitri Pinsker, who covers the Duma for the respected news magazine Itogi. "There is almost no way to trace illicit money," Pinsker he continued "There is no oversight and no paper trail. You can't prove anything." And, as for sexual harassment, its not an issue: "It's the norm, our version of the work ethic."

Alla Gerber, a Russian female legislator from a liberal reform party who lost her bid for re-election in December, and being Jewish as well as female has endured slurs from colleagues on the floor on both counts. "The main problem is the low cultural level of 80 percent of Duma members," she said. "Most come from the old nomenklatura of the provinces and have no idea what civilized behavior is."

Foreigners view the Duma with a mixture of horror and fascination. So do the reporters who cover it. "The only other parliament I've visited was in Israel," Pinsker said. "It [the Knesset] was boring."