By Vladimir Kovalyev
The Moscow Times

Last week, the State Duma voted down a proposal by the Liberal Russia party to set up a parliamentary commission to investigate the 1999 apartment-building bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk, which killed more than 300 people.

Liberal Russia, it should be recalled, is funded by self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who has been claiming for months now that the FSB was behind the explosions. In voting down the motion, deputies probably felt that there was no point in getting lost in the labyrinth of mutual accusation and denial that this scandal threatens to become. But I really wonder if refusing to discuss the matter and hear whatever evidence is available is really the right way for a struggling democracy to proceed.

The other day, Yuly Rybakov, a Duma deputy from St. Petersburg who was elected on the Union of Right Forces ticket but who is now a leader of Liberal Russia (although he says that he is not a member of the party and lists himself as an independent), handed me a transcript of a session of the Duma that was held on Sept. 13, 1999.

The situation at that session was very tense. There had already been considerable violence in Dagestan and, earlier that very day, an apartment-building explosion on Kashirskoye Shosse in Moscow that killed 124 people. According to the transcript, a very strange thing happened as the session was being opened. Speaker Gennady Seleznyov interrupted the proceedings with a surprising announcement.

"I have just received a report. According to information from Rostov- on-Don, an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night," Seleznyov said.

And then Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and deputy speaker of the Duma, chimed in: "And there is a nuclear power station in Volgodonsk." The deputies then proceeded to discuss the situation without returning to this startling information.

The interesting thing about this exchange is that the apartment- building explosion in Volgodonsk, which killed 19 people, took place three days later, on Sept. 16.

Rybakov has sent an official inquiry about the incident to the Prosecutor General's Office, asking that Seleznyov be questioned about the incident. The speaker himself has been coy. Cornered by reporters last month in the Duma, he was asked who gave him this report and he replied with a broad smile, "It wasn't Berezovsky."

Maybe there is an innocent explanation. As it turns out, there was an explosion in Volgodonsk on Sept. 13. A small device went off on a city street, injuring two schoolteachers and a student. A homemade bomb also exploded in the village of Artyom in the Primorye region that day.

What disturbs me most is that the deputies in the Duma don't seem at all curious about any of this. They voted not to screen Berezovsky's "The Assassination of Russia" film at an official session. The pro-Kremlin factions -- Unity and Fatherland-All Russia - - voted the resolution down, despite the fact that the Communists, Agrarians and the Union of Right Forces voted to watch the film. Control of the Duma these days is in the hands of the Kremlin.

Rybakov told me that more than 200 deputies took copies of the film from him to watch at home. "They will watch it under their blankets so that no one sees them," Rybakov said with a sneer.

Union of Right Forces leader Boris Nemtsov was quoted by the BBC last week expressing despair over the concept of parliamentary inquiries.

"The experience of attempts to set up a commission to probe the Kursk disaster shows that the centrist factions never support the idea of commissions of inquiry, fearing that they may thereby do their boss a disservice," Nemtsov said.

It looks like it will still be a while before Duma deputies see the people of Russia as their "boss" and worry about whether or not they are doing the people a "disservice."

Vladimir Kovalyev is a reporter for The St. Petersburg Times.