With lawmakers in the State Duma still hard at it till after midnight, it was a sight long unseen in Russia, where the lower house of parliament had once famously been described by a former speaker as a "place unfit for discussion."
Finally, at about 12:03 a.m., a controversial new bill which sharply increases the size of fines for breaching laws governing protests was approved by a 241-147 vote.
"The law has, alas, been passed, but we did return discussion to the Duma and believe me, we significantly changed the atmosphere in the Russian parliament," Dmitry Gudkov, a lawmaker with the opposition A Just Russia party, wrote on his blog on Wednesday.
The unprecedented 11 hours of tepid debate which preceded the third and final reading of the new legislation were clearly a little too much for some.
Footage aired live on state television showed bored and drowsy deputies from the ruling United Russia party struggle to make it through nearly 400 amendments submitted by A Just Russia.
The bill, which now requires the signature of President Vladimir Putin to become law, after it was passed by the upper house on Wednesday, could see the maximum fine for breaking protest rules jump sharply from the current 5,000 rubles ($160) to 300,000 rubles ($9,200) for participants and 600,000 rubles ($18,000) for officials, sums which are far beyond the means of an average Russian.
The new fines were proposed by United Russia in the wake of clashes between police and protesters at a rally in downtown Moscow on the eve of Putin's May 7 inauguration for a third term.
The bill was fast-tracked through parliament ahead of a new demonstration planned in Moscow on June 12.
Rights activists say the bill violates Russia's Constitution on freedom of assembly, and A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov told parliament on Tuesday it was designed to "scare off those who are ready to take part in civil protests."
A Just Russia lawmaker Gudkov announced plans to stage what he called the "Italian strike" during Tuesday's vote last month and urged activists to help draw up the amendments that kept lawmakers in the Duma till such a late hour.
But while the rather monotonous procedure in the Duma on Tuesday night - with A Just Russia or Communist deputy tabling an amendment, United Russia rejecting it - may have been something new, it hardly indicated real politics was on its way back to Russia, said Alexei Mukhin, head of the Center for Political Technologies think-tank.
"Opposition lawmakers were only pretending that discussion was taking place. If they had submitted coherent and politically correct amendments, parliamentarianism would have returned to the Duma, but what we saw yesterday was reminiscent of Ukraine," he told RIA Novosti. "A Just Russia were just working off a credit of trust granted to it by protesters."
Gudkov and his fellow party member, Ilya Ponomaryov, have been prominent in the huge anti-government protests which erupted after the disputed parliamentary elections in December, and are understood to be working to help solicit official permission for the June 12 rally.
"They knew perfectly well the bill was going to be passed because the opposition does not have enough seats in the Duma to block it, so what they did was just another demonstration of their protest," said analyst Sergei Mikheyev of the Center for Political Assessment.
"They're fighting for power and trying to gain points for the next election."
Opposition leader and Yeltsin-era Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov said the new fines would "do nothing to stop the protests."
"It will only make demonstrators more radical," he told RIA Novosti after the bill's first hearing late last month.
Tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov, who came third in the March presidential poll, told the Dozhd TV channel on Tuesday that the new law would "lead to misunderstanding."
"It has no clear-cut criteria, and this is always dangerous. I do not support these measures," he said.
The bill was also criticized as unduly harsh by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who took over the leadership of United Russia, from Putin, last month.
