The fate of Russia’s disappearing presidential candidate cleared up Tuesday when he turned up alive and seemingly well in Ukraine. But the mystery of what really happened to him only deepened.
| "I mean, I'd like to tell yez what happened, but I was drunk..." |
Ivan Rybkin, a former parliamentary speaker mounting a long-shot challenge to President Vladimir Putin in the March 14 election, returned to Moscow on an evening flight, saying he had simply gone to see friends in Kiev and was stunned to learn that people were looking for him.
| "There wuz this babe, named Brandy, see? An' she was jus' so-o-o-o friendly an' all, I thought I'd pop over an' see her. So I picks up a bottle..." |
His explanation left no one satisfied -- not the police, who have spent the last several days scouring Russia for him; not his financial backer, who said it could spell the end of Rybkin’s political career; not his campaign manager, who fumed that she might quit over the episode; and certainly not his wife, who proclaimed that any husband who would go off on a secret vacation without telling her was hardly fit to govern the country.
| "'Brandy'? Who the hell is 'BRANDY'?" |
"I have the right to two or three days of private life," Rybkin protested when he called Interfax news agency to report his whereabouts. "I came to Kiev with my friends, had fun, turned off mobile phones and didn’t watch television. I decided last week to take a break from all the bustle around me." On landing later at an airport in Moscow, Rybkin suggested that he might drop out of the race because his family was so upset.
| "I mean, cheeze! The little woman is steamed!" |
"Poor Russia if this kind of man is trying to run it," his angry wife, Albina, told NTV television.
| "I work and I slave, I give you the best years of my life, and what do I get in return? The back of your hand! THAT'S what I get in return! My mother told me not to marry you, but did I listen? No! I didn't listen! I coulda married Volodya, you know!" |
While he had emerged as Putin’s most outspokenly critical challenger, Rybkin attracted far more attention with his absence than his presence in a presidential race where he is drawing less than 1 percent support in public opinion polls. Critics smelled a publicity stunt.
"Sasha, does this smell like antique flounder to you?"
[Sniff!] "I don't think so. More like a publicity stunt."
"How do you tell the difference?"
"It's a professional secret, Misha." |
"For the last several days, Rybkin is the most widely used name" in the news, Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house of parliament and also a presidential candidate, said in an interview a few hours before Rybkin resurfaced. "Even President Putin’s name is used not as often. We can think about whether that was done on purpose or not."
| Uhuh. And what do you think. |
Allies rejected that theory, saying Rybkin was a sober, responsible figure.
| "I mean, I've never seen him that drunk before!" |
"He’s not the kind who would be playing such games," Ruslan Khasbulatov, another former parliamentary speaker, said by telephone Tuesday while Rybkin was still missing. Yet even friends found it hard to believe that he simply left for five days without telling anyone; some wondered whether that was a cover story for something more nefarious, such as an unpleasant encounter with Russian security services or illicit figures associated with political rivals.
| I'd go with the Brandy story, myself. Or maybe it was Tiffany... |
Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire Putin critic who has bankrolled Rybkin’s campaign, said he reached Rybkin by telephone Tuesday afternoon after his reemergence and remained baffled by the incident. "It absolutely doesn’t coincide with my understanding of him," Berezovsky said in an interview from Britain, where he lives in asylum. "He’s very precise, very brave, very clever." Berezovsky said that in their conversation, Rybkin made a cryptic reference to Chechnya, where he has previously tried to broker peace in the long-running war between Russian forces and separatist rebels. "I felt that he was not alone," Berezovsky said without elaborating.
| "Yersh, by Gawd! 'At's what I wuzh doin'! I wuzh makin' peash in Shesh-... Shesch-... the Caucasus!" |
Berezovsky’s Liberal Russia political party has been wracked by violence. Six men are on trial in Moscow in connection with the murder last year of Sergei Yushenkov, a party leader who broke with Berezovsky. One suspect said in court this week that another party leader had given him $50,000 to have Yushenkov killed. |