Will it be a hardline hate-fest, with the government, the speaker, and grudging respect for Russian parliamentarianism the immediate victims?


Or will lawmakers pick up the spirit with which they left off when breaking for the summer recess last July, passing much-needed legislation with dispatch and not letting ideological differences get in the way?


Only one thing will be certain when the State Duma reconvenes Wednesday: The 449 legislators will finally have a nice place to work. In the newly renovated headquarters on Okhotny Ryad, each deputy and his staff will get an office, a phone and a computer, the first time the dumtsy, as they are known, have had such amenities since their election last December.


The office space and the new appliances would be enough to appease the corps of deputies -- were it not for the fact that, according to Vladimir Bauer, the Duma's Organizational Committee chairman, the phones and computers have yet to be plugged in. Not only that: The cafeteria might not quite be up and running, and the elevators and ventilators will be working only by the end of the year.


With no one to call, nowhere to play Tetris, nowhere to eat, and having to sweat and huff and puff up and down the stairs, the deputies will undoubtedly be in a foul mood when the session opens.


That spells trouble for Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin's government: Even before they knew about these legislative inconveniences, the Communists and Agrarians had promised to call a no-confidence vote.


Whether they attract the 225 votes necessary to get the matter on the docket will depend, as usual, on the 60-odd deputies of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party faction.


Zhirinovsky has said that he will not initiate any attacks on the government, but he might support one if provoked. Word has it that the excitable ultranationalist leader did not get an office with a Kremlin view, as he had requested. He might consider that alone to be sufficient provocation.


Despite the fact that this is autumn in Russia and political tensions are running high again, both President Boris Yeltsin and State Duma speaker Ivan Rybkin have dismissed the threat of a no-confidence vote. "The bloodthirstiness toward the government that they write about in the press does not exist in the State Duma," Rybkin told Izvestia last week.


But Rybkin and Yeltsin have begun damage control just in case the Duma embarks on the more likely path suggested by Sergei Glazyev, the Economics Committee chairman, who has proposed first letting the government account for itself -- and then making a decision about a vote of no confidence.


The speaker has suggested making slight changes in the cabinet's makeup to "improve its competence"; Yeltsin on Tuesday allowed that he might make a few personnel changes that would not affect the course of reforms. His chief of staff, Sergei Filatov, let on last week that these changes could involve the arrival of a Communist in the cabinet.


Will that alone buy off the opposition? Probably not. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov is still talking about the Russian parliament meeting with its Ukrainian and Belarussian counterparts to overturn the December 1991 pact that finished off the Soviet Union.


While dreaming of his "new united union government of historical imperative," Zyuganov and his comrades will be able to take inspiration from the state seal of the Soviet Union, which has not been taken down and replaced with the Russian double eagle as previously planned. The reason: City architects have declared the Duma building -- a dour, gray block -- a monument to Soviet architecture, meaning that all emblems and embellishments must stay.


"The Soviet seal will carry only historical weight," Bauer said Monday. But it is not hard to imagine it acquiring symbolic mass during coming debates.


Among planned laws are a packet of 40 that Yeltsin handed to the Duma on such fundamentals as the workings of the government, banks and securities.


Over the summer the Duma gave preliminary approval to a civil code that opens the way for a law on contracts -- a quantum leap forward for Russia.


Will that spirit prevail during this fall's debating of these no less important pieces of legislation? Or will the Duma become the realm of those whom Yeltsin termed "politicians who are calling for deciding all problems by means of slamming their fists on the table"?


The president said he would not succumb to the temptation himself. But Yeltsin's history with previous parliaments rules nothing out.