As if there was any doubt left that things are just different out East...Russia's Missing Candidate Surfaces.

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.

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.

This is the guy backed by exile oligarch Boris Berezovsky -- and reached in Lodon, even Berezovsky says he doesn't know what the heck he was doing. Rybkin, for his part, says he just wanted to see Kiev, which is lovely this time of year, and turned off his mobile phone.

Cut to his wife:

"Poor Russia, if this type of person tries to run the country," she told an Interfax reporter.

"You mean your husband?" the reporter asked.

"Yes," she said.

And people said Howard Dean's wife wasn't supportive enough....

Now the most common theory seems to be that Rybkin disappeared just to gain publicity. Yes, you read that correctly: He disappeared to gain publicity. Every day is opposite day in Russia!