Restore address book
I was attempting to work out a bug with iTunes.  iTunes was refusing to put my contacts on my new iPod.  And no groups were showing in iTunes.

One thing led to another, and I found myself looking at a blank address book.  You can imagine my consternation when my iPhone contacts got smoked before I could shut down a sync.

I could import from my backups, but, like the original poster, the contacts would appear for about a second before disappearing again.

Shutting down the contacts iCloud sync and then logging out of iCloud worked.  I was then able to import either one of my two backups without issue.