A constipated control freak is tormenting St. Petersburg
Hail Skroob!
The governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, is a smarmy weasel whose indifference to observable reality threatens to despoil that cherished city and all of its inhabitants.
Unsurprisingly, Beglov is also President Skroob’s doppelganger. They’re twins. Did Mel Brooks try to warn us that one day Russia’s second-largest city would be desecrated by a mustachioed buffoon? More and more we think this is the case, yes.
Why is Beglov such a major asshole? We’re glad you asked.
An insatiable cattle tag addict
Planning a fun weekend getaway to Russia’s Venice of the North? As of January 2, a cattle tag is now required when visiting all stores and shopping centers (excluding grocery stores), restaurants and bars, cultural institutions, swimming pools, fitness centers, entertainment establishments, hotels, large venues and sporting events.
Beglov loves the cattle tag. Love isn’t even the right word, actually. He has an insatiable fixation. With each passing day, Beglov’s burning desire to tag St. Petersburg becomes more manic and creepy:
Governor Alexander Beglov said that by joint efforts in St. Petersburg it will be possible to achieve the work of all the restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus. […]
“The first checks in January showed that services in St. Petersburg are ready to work according to strict rules. It is important that with each subsequent control measure, the proportion of detected violations decreases,” Beglov noted. “I want to thank the city prosecutor's office for a clear explanation of the rules for compliance with QR codes and responsibility before the law. I am sure that by joint efforts we will achieve compliance in St. Petersburg with all the restrictions necessary to protect the health of people.”
He doesn’t even try to hide it. It’s out in the open. You couldn’t ask for more honesty from a Russian politician—especially not from a member of United Russia.
St. Petersburg “will not return to its former way of life,” Beglov decreed on January 3, a day after expanding the city’s QR code regime. “COVID is with us for a long time. Our task is to return the city to its usual business in the conditions of the new normality, to accelerate the transition to a new norm. New restrictions, empowering employers to exclude the unvaccinated from work, new vaccination incentives and ubiquitous QR codes are an important and very timely step in this direction.”
Is this guy too lazy to come up with his own material? He’s just Yandex-translating Justin Trudeau speeches, isn’t he?
It really makes you wonder. Is cattle-tagging St. Petersburg Beglov’s own ingenious idea? If it is, he doesn’t want to answer questions about it. When the city’s Health Committee was asked whether there are plans to cattle-tag children, the esteemed public health body forwarded the query to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Human garbage
Beglov is really concerned about public health and sanitation. These formidable issues keep him up at night. He’s so focused on making sure every resident of St. Petersburg is bar-coded, for public health, that he’s becoming a bit forgetful. Like, he’s forgetting to clean up the mountains of garbage piling up in the streets of his city:
Apparently there aren’t enough garbage trucks in St. Petersburg. Maybe Beglov should invest in some garbage trucks to haul away all the unsanitary garbage? Seems like an obvious solution to this problem but of course that’s assuming Beglov actually cares about public health and sanitation. An unwise assumption, in our humble opinion.
Snow piles against Beglov
This lowlife can’t even take responsibility for clearing snow. Did the snow surprise you, Beglov? In northern Russia? During winter?
We’ve heard from our operative in St. Petersburg that residents have been making dangerous expeditions to the summits of random mountains of snow blocking their path to the grocery store. Have you read Into Thin Air—A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster? It’s sort of like that but imagine little old ladies with their push-carts crawling up the slopes of Mt. Beglov. And most of them don’t even have icepicks.
Beglov has given St. Petersburg free climbing walls to enjoy and exercise on. But do the people say thank you? No, they graffiti these snow piles with “Beglov is a scumbag”:
This snow pile is now famous in St. Petersburg. A national hero like Alexander Nevsky. Local media even liveblogged its removal:
On the morning of January 10, a large icy snowdrift was noticed near the Sennaya Ploshchad metro station in the center of St. Petersburg. It is written in black with an insult to the governor of the city Alexander Beglov, who is blamed for poor snow removal. […]
Update from 12:00. Snowdrift clean-up begins.Update from 12:00 pm. The snowdrift began to be removed… A little less than an hour has passed since the publication of this news, and an hour and a half since the accumulation of snow was first noticed.
According to an eyewitness, public utilities employees removed the inscription separately, the machines worked in the neighborhood. “When I was with Senna, two cars loaded with snow had already left. The excavator driver drove up, took a photo as a keepsake and began to rake the neighboring snowdrift,” he said.
This is an outrage:
Trouble ahead? Maybe!
This Beglov guy is really asking for it. We were browsing Russian Language News Websites—which, unlike the Incredulous 5D Russia Blogs, actually acknowledge there is compulsory vaccination and cattle tags in Russia—and came across an intriguing article about growing socioeconomic tensions in this country.
What you are about to read was written by a Russian, for Russians, in the Russian language:
Although experts doubt that QR codes themselves can become a trigger for the start of popular unrest, in the current situation, the growth of discontent is noticeable at the household level and without sociological measurements.
Vladimir Sokratilin, executive director of the consulting company Decision, notes that the level of social tension is rarely determined by any one factor, most often it is a combination of reasons. Nevertheless, in the public mind, all these factors form an image that is described at the everyday level by the term “injustice”. According to Vladimir Sokratilin, the point is not that the real incomes of the population do not grow or even fall, but that the reason for this fall seems to the majority of the population “the result of the wrong actions of the authorities.”
“Social tension does not necessarily mean that people will certainly take to the streets and protest. However, the higher the level of social tension, the higher the likelihood of a social explosion. If there are opportunities and channels for interaction between government and society, then the most dangerous thing that can await the country is a political crisis. But what happens when there are no channels for an agreement, we observe in Kazakhstan.
I like how a lot of these officials totally forgot that they’re supposed to at least use the excuse of “preventing death” and “keeping people safe” and “until the virus situation improves” and are just straight up talking about implementing repressive measures like “we rule so wtf u gonna do son?”
The more repressive it gets the more it is obvious that they could give a damn about pandemics and health. This is what will do them in IMO
Now that you mention it, Bill Gaids looks a lot like the Dark Helmet without the helmet.