Russian politics routinely toggles between blood sport and comic relief. On Tuesday, presidential hopeful Ivan Rybkin turned it into theater of the absurd, telling the nation he vanished not because he had been kidnapped or arrested by secret police, but because he simply needed a break from it all.
For five days, Russian security service agents carried out a large-scale search for Rybkin, missing since Thursday night. His wife and campaign staff worried that he might be dead or held hostage.
Instead, Rybkin, 57, the former Kremlin national security chief, said he was enjoying a visit with old friends in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. He never called his wife or campaign aides, and he switched off his cell phone.
He told his campaign manager Tuesday afternoon that the “hysteria” over his disappearance bewildered him.
“He told me he had a pleasant time meeting his friends and that the weather in Kiev was fine,” said Rybkin’s campaign manager, Ksenia Ponomaryova. “If he has no other explanation other than he wanted to see some friends and get some rest, it’s the end of his political career.”
Ponomaryova said she probably would quit the campaign.
Wife didn’t know
Rybkin’s wife, Albina Rybkina, learned through a telephone call from the Russian news agency Interfax that her husband was safe and returning to Moscow late Tuesday.
“Poor Russia, which is governed by such people,” Rybkin’s wife told Interfax, referring to her husband. She added she would not be at the airport to greet him.
Rybkin was anything but contrite when he spoke to Interfax by phone Tuesday afternoon. “I have the right to two or three days of private life,” he said. But when he arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport late Tuesday, he acknowledged that he had hurt his family and said he may quit the race.
“I was very upset to hear my daughter crying over the phone,” he said outside the terminal. “But thank God I’m back here in my Motherland. I won’t say anything more.”
Rybkin’s campaign aides and Moscow political analysts said Rybkin’s behavior was extremely out of character. Rybkin led Russian national security under former President Boris Yeltsin, was speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament and briefly led Russian negotiators during talks with separatists in Chechnya.
Rybkin is one of six challengers running against Russian President Vladimir Putin in the March 14 election, a contest Putin is expected to win in a landslide. One of Putin’s harshest critics, Rybkin is financially backed by a longtime foe of Putin, self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Rybkin is the candidate of the Liberal Russia party, which Berezovsky founded.
Rybkin disappeared Thursday evening after his driver and bodyguard dropped him off at his Moscow apartment. His campaign staff became concerned when he failed to appear at a news conference Friday afternoon and at Russia’s Central Election Commission for a meeting Saturday.
Rybkin’s wife reported him missing Sunday. Russian law requires relatives to wait three days to file a report of a missing person.
Theories swirled
Afterward, a bevy of theories about Rybkin’s vanishing swirled through Moscow.
His campaign aides theorized that his disappearance could be connected to a Feb. 2 full-page ad he had placed in the Berezovsky-owned Russian daily Kommersant calling Putin’s methods authoritarian and accusing him of “high treason.”
After the ad ran, Russian authorities clamped down on the Rybkin campaign, conducting a surprise late-night search of Rybkin’s election headquarters and arresting a campaign aide on charges of forging nominating signatures.
Other observers suggested Rybkin’s disappearance could be linked to the trial of four men charged with the April 2003 murder of Sergei Yushenkov, a Liberal Russia party leader and a former member of parliament.
Yushenkov led a group of politicians who had split off from Liberal Russia. Mikhail Kodanev, another Liberal Russia member, has been charged with ordering that Yushenkov be killed. Rybkin was expected to testify at the trial.
Still another theory suggested Rybkin’s disappearance was a hoax aimed at generating publicity for a foundering campaign. Recent polls put Rybkin’s support among voters at 1 percent. Support for his fellow challengers is just as meager, while Putin’s popularity with voters tops 70 percent.
Some members of Putin’s United Russia party think Rybkin and Berezovsky staged the whole episode.
“It’s a trick that says a lot about this man,” said Vladimir Pekhtin, a United Russia member of parliament and the chamber’s vice speaker. “There is no doubt Rybkin worked out this scenario, probably in cooperation with Boris Berezovsky, whose interests he represents.”
Rybkin told Interfax that it was no hoax, that he merely needed a respite from a hectic, draining schedule. After getting home Thursday night, he left some fruit he had bought that day on the table, left money for his wife, changed his sports coat and left to board a train for Kiev.
While in Kiev, he avoided television and radio, he said. Then on Tuesday he picked up a Russian newspaper and was shocked to read that his quiet getaway had become worldwide news.
“I haven’t disappeared anywhere,” he told Russia’s Echo Moskvy radio.
Credibility compromised
Analysts and politicians of all stripes doubted Rybkin could regain credibility with voters and predicted that his political future was doomed.
Even Rybkin’s closest ally, Berezovsky, doubted Rybkin could survive politically.
“I always knew him as a person who was never inclined to any adventures and always extremely responsible,” Berezovsky told Echo Moskvy. “If we find out this disappearance is just adventure, then Rybkin’s political career is over.”
The only empathy Rybkin could muster Tuesday came from fellow presidential challenger Oleg Malyshkin, a bodyguard for ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky whose sole claim to fame was his fistfight with a political opponent during a live televised debate in December.
“Why are we having a complex about this?” Malyshkin said. “He wanted to go, and he went.”
