Russian Democracy

[A Black Falcon]

How odd...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/intern...-RUSS.html

Missing Russian Candidate Is Found Alive
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

Published: February 10, 2004

OSCOW, Feb. 10 — Just as bizarrely as he disappeared on Thursday, a Russian presidential candidate reappeared today — alive, well rested and confused about the furor.

"I decided last week to take a break from all the bustle around me," Ivan P. Rybkin told Interfax from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, by way of explaining his disappearance, which terrified his family and his campaign aides and prompted a police manhunt for his whereabouts.

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Mr. Rybkin, a former speaker of parliament who is challenging President Vladimir V. Putin in an election now barely a month away, managed to roil, if briefly and now farcically, a race whose outcome is universally considered a foregone conclusion.

Mr. Rybkin, 57, left his apartment on Thursday evening, after dismissing his bodyguards, and took a train to Kiev, he said in interviews with Russian news agencies.

Evidently he informed neither his wife nor his campaign aides, who grew increasingly alarmed when he failed to appear at a press conference last Friday and failed to surface when election officials registered his candidacy a day later. On Sunday, the police opened an official search for Mr. Rybkin.

Mr. Rybkin was flying back to Moscow this evening.

Mr. Rybkin's initial explanations for his five-day absence did little to clear up the mystery of his sudden departure, just as his Quixotic campaign against Mr. Putin should have been beginning.

His disappearance raised fears that something untoward had happened to him, prompting speculation that he had been a victim of politically motivated violence. In the days before he left, he openly criticized Mr. Putin for cultivating close ties with business tycoons and eroding democratic freedoms in Russia.

Kseniya Y. Ponomaryova, Mr. Rybkin's campaign chairman, said in an interview tonight that she had spoken with Mr. Rybkin by telephone from Kiev. He explained that he was staying with friends. He had shut off his mobile telephone and ignored television, radio and newspapers, which were increasingly full of reports about the police search for him.

"Can't a person take some rest?" she said he told her.

Mr. Rybkin was never going to defeat Mr. Putin, but Ms. Ponomaryova said that his actions had done "a lot of harm" to his campaign and his credibility. She later told Interfax that while she was pleased that we was safe, she did not expect to continue to work for his campaign.

Yes, people, this is the kind of opponents Putin has...