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The mood was sentimental as the Primorye Duma held its last its session Nov. 19, and when Chairman Nikolai Litvinov stood to speak, he acknowledged that not all of the 35 members would return.

After all, only 19 were standing for election, and nearly 300 candidates had announced their intention to run for the body.

Nevertheless, all the wisdom gained over four years of statesmenship — the attempts to unseat Mayor Victor Cherepkov, the election delayed for two years — would not go to waste. “We can meet with the new Duma deputies after the election, and ask if they need any assistance,” Litvinov said.

The Duma ended a term marked by contention with a flury of votes. The parliament recognized Cossacks, agreed to an exam for municipal employees, agreed to appoint a human rights director, approved a bill in second reading that would provide money to municipal newspapers. But for a body that had twice delayed its election date, the farewell didn’t seem to stir much controversy on the street. Even those working in the shadow of the White House still wanted to talk about Cherepkov.

“I think it wasn’t right for the Duma to [try to] sack Cherepkov,” said Igor Zhmilkov, a 37-year-old retired military officer who now picks up passengers in his car for a living. However, the Duma, he suggested, did succeed in stirring more interest in elections. “If the elections had been held last year, I think just a small part of the population would have turned out,” he said.

The Duma is hardly a hotbed of popularity. GID, a center for advertising and political studies at Far Eastern State University, said that the majority of the 301 people contacted in a telephone poll gave the Duma a negative rating.

The Duma was elected Oct. 23, 1994, in a vote remarkable for its low turnout. “While still relatively new to the voluntary electoral process,” the Vladivostok News wrote at the time, “Primorye residents have proven masters of one prominent feature of most Western elections — apathy.”

Interestingly, Cherepkov, who would later turn out to be the Duma’s dire foe, attempted to run for the body. He didn’t make it. Of the 39,000 registered voters in his district, only 4,000 turned out to vote, and Cherepkov himself won only 1,826.

The Duma twice delayed its elections, most recently last January, when it stalled the vote until December. And the Duma won the scorn of Vladivostok newspapers when it attempted to unseat the mayor, then backed down, claiming victory because it supposedly forced Cherepkov to hold City Duma elections.

The Krai Duma has at times been a place where deputies are content to represent their own interests. Deputy Yury Didenko, president of Dalmoreproduct, urged the Duma to vote to cut his company’s taxes from 90-100 million rubles to 18-19 million a year. He said the company’s tax burden is unfair, and growing.

“At the moment fishing companies pay most of the taxes in the federal and local budget,” he said.

The deputies voted down his plan for a tax break; after all, they worried about what their finance department would think. But they agreed to create a comission to study the possibility.

“If we take this decision now, it will be abrogated, because the prosecutor will be against it,” Litvinov said.

At the end of the Duma’s final session, Anatoly Tatuiko, head of the Primorye Cossacks, stood and offered a word of praise. “There will be no better Duma than the existing one,” he said. “This one was the best.”

Then he provided a word of caution to those who will stand on the shoulders of giants: “I have pictures of the candidates of the next Duma, and I think those guys do not realize what a mess they’re getting into.”