A Plague on Your House: What's Really Going on in Russia? – HotAir

Earlier today (Monday), I got a message from a friend who works in Russia. With some difficulty, I might add, since he’s British and has to go back and forth circuitously via the Middle East. I won’t give too much away about him, but here’s what he’d heard: Realtors in St. Petersburg are cancelling viewings because the city is about to enter a lockdown. Tomorrow (Tuesday). The reason? An outbreak of pneumonic plague that’s spread from Siberia and is now, apparently, threatening European Russia, the country’s most populous region.

By the time this essay has been published, we’ll know whether that prediction was correct. Either there will be a COVID-style lockdown in St. Petersburg and maybe elsewhere in Russia too, or there won’t. As much as I like being right—who doesn’t? —I don’t fancy a repeat of the COVID pandemic. I’ve had my fill of being confined to my house, told where I can go and whom I can associate with, being unable to go to a pub or a restaurant without a mask and a stupid app on my phone, forced to bargain with the government for my own freedom, threatened with ostracism for refusing experimental treatments I know will do far more harm than good. I’m never doing that shit again. Ever.

I hope it’s all a big, fat, juicy nothingburger, and you can pin a rosette on my chest for being 100% wrong, and I’ll smile for the camera and laugh.

As for my friend, he’s a stand-up bloke. Private school, Oxbridge, Sandhurst, patriotic, smart, very funny. If that’s what he was told, that’s what he was told, and I believe him.

Truth is, nobody really knows what’s happening in Russia right now—not even the Russian people. Only the Russian government, and it’s being tight-lipped even by its stony standards.

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