Co-op Apartment: How the New Head of St. Petersburg Is Connected to Putin's Friends

This week, Alexander Beglov replaced Georgy Poltavchenko as governor of St. Petersburg. Poltavchenko has become the biggest victim of the Kremlin's regional policy crisis . He was planning to run for reelection for another term in the summer, but the Kremlin apparently decided that it was better not to take risks in traditionally protest-minded St. Petersburg. Who was chosen as his successor?

Poltavchenko and Beglov are as similar as twins in their biographies: both were born in Baku, both knew Putin from St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, and both worked in the Kremlin for a long time without being public politicians. But Alexander Beglov remained in the shadows much longer than his predecessor: the post of plenipotentiary representative in the Northwestern Federal District has been the pinnacle of his political career until now. Unlike Putin’s other acquaintances from St. Petersburg, he did not start a big business or try himself as the head of a state corporation. Nevertheless, as The Bell has found out, Beglov is part of the president’s closest circle.

• House on Rochdelskaya . As an aide to President Putin in 2005, Beglov received an apartment on Rochdelskaya Street (158.8 sq. m) from the Presidential Property Management Department, according to Rosreestr data. In the same building, living space was then allocated to the future head of Sberbank, German Gref, and the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin. This apartment is still in family ownership - according to official records, it is now registered to Beglov's wife's full namesake, Natalya.
• Family . Natalia Beglova also works in the St. Petersburg administration. She heads the city Committee for Civil Registry Affairs (here is her declaration ).
• Beglov's eldest daughter, Yulia, works as the head of the legal department of the St. Petersburg Committee for Culture, and her husband, Pavel Belov, the 1998 Russian champion in acrobatic rock-n-roll and a boogie-woogie teacher, heads the city's Committee for Physical Culture and Sports.
• The youngest daughter of the acting governor of St. Petersburg, Olga Kudryashova, is an associate professor of the constitutional law department, director of the mediation center of the law faculty of St. Petersburg State University, and teaches at the faculty. Her full namesake owns apartments on Nalichnaya Street on Vasilievsky Island in St. Petersburg. The owners of one of these apartments were previously the family of the co-owner of Bank Rossiya, Yuri Kovalchuk . And the second apartment had five well-known co-owners at once - the same Kovalchuk, presidential aide Andrei Fursenko, his brother, president of the Zenit football club Sergei Fursenko, one of the organizers of the Ozero cooperative Viktor Myachin and the former head of Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin.
• In addition, the namesake of Beglov's youngest daughter owns a plot of land and a house of 473 square meters in the settlement of Sosnovo in the Priozersky district, next to the Igora ski resort. According to Reuters, the resort belongs to the family of Yuri Kovalchuk and an offshore company whose beneficiaries are not disclosed, and the wedding of the president's alleged daughter Katerina Tikhonova took place here in 2013.

Sobchak's return . The elections in St. Petersburg will take place in less than a year, and Ksenia Sobchak could well compete with Beglov. At least, the candidate from the opposition "Party of Change" has already stated that she "does not rule out" her participation.

• "This is a serious statement. No one talks about their intention to run if they are not really considering such a possibility. Sobchak is very concerned about the fate of St. Petersburg," Timur Valeev, a member of the political council of the Party of Change, told The Bell. "We delicately hinted to Sobchak that this [nomination] would be a good option in terms of promoting the party," adds his colleague Andrei Nechaev. Both of The Bell's interlocutors talk as if the party's participation in the elections is already a done deal: they talk about plans to reach an agreement with other "democratic forces" in St. Petersburg and bet on a single candidate.
• In light of the recent scandals in the gubernatorial elections, the Kremlin will likely be interested in Sobchak's participation in the gubernatorial elections - and this is another argument in favor of the nomination taking place. "Everyone I talked to on the other side of the Kremlin wall is happy with how she handled the presidential elections," says Konstantin Gaaze, an invited expert at the Moscow Carnegie Center. He believes that Sobchak has every chance of gaining about 20% - if she can reach an agreement with other opposition candidates. For the Kremlin, this will be a win-win situation: she will remove all claims about the transparency of the elections.

Anton Baev, Valeria Pozychanyuk