In Russia, it’s hard to escape MAX, the new state-controlled messaging app.
Billboards are trumpeting it. Schools are recommending it. Celebrities are being paid to push it. Cellphones are sold with it preloaded. In one city southeast of Moscow, the municipal emergency loudspeaker belted out an exhortation to install it.
Moscow is also pursuing a more subversive strategy to get Russians on the app. For weeks, the authorities have been sabotaging the two most popular alternatives, WhatsApp and Telegram, by impeding voice and video calls on those services in what the government called an “antifraud” measure. Calls made over MAX have remained crystal clear.
The rollout of the new “super app” is the latest step by President Vladimir V. Putin to tighten control over what can be seen and said online in Russia. Mr. Putin, analysts say, is pushing to move Russians to what Moscow calls a “sovereign internet,” an online world cut off from Western technology and other foreign influences that is more susceptible to government censorship and control.
“If you have a free internet where everyone can do what they want, for an authoritarian system that just doesn’t work,” said Philipp Dietrich, an expert on the Russian internet at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “So what you need to do is push users to domestic systems that you somehow can control.”
For years, Mr. Putin has railed against foreign tech companies for their unwillingness to bend fully to Kremlin rules. In May, he said such companies that were operating in Russia while acting against the country’s interests needed to be “strangled.”
Now, with YouTube videos throttled, Facebook and Instagram officially banned and WhatsApp and Telegram calls inhibited, Moscow is tightening the vise.
The Kremlin’s alternative to the messaging platforms, MAX, resembles WeChat, the app that dominates life in China. There, the authorities strictly censor the internet and block content from the outside world through a “Great Firewall.” How far Moscow will go in its efforts to restrict the internet is unclear.
“You need to do this in a way that you don’t come across completely as a dictatorship,” Mr. Dietrich said of the Kremlin.
The Russian authorities have turned the screws gradually, Mr. Dietrich said. For instance, they have slowed YouTube instead of banning the service outright. They have also stopped short of outlawing virtual private networks, or VPNs, which enable Russian users to circumvent many of the restrictions. That has tempered the popular outcry.
“I think the Russian leadership is quite unsure about how far they can go,” Mr. Dietrich said. “That’s why they unleash things very, very slowly and wait for a reaction and see how it goes.”
For many Russians, the reaction has been frustration. Yevgeny Zudin, a 35-year-old industrial worker, described how the changes had made it more difficult for him to stay in touch with fellow paleontology enthusiasts around the world. He attended a small protest in Omsk, the city in southwestern Siberia where he lives.
“This is happening gradually, and people don’t notice it,” he said. “They think that one limitation of their rights and freedoms is tolerable, but if they accept it, we will keep getting more isolated and unable to communicate with the outside world.” Mr. Zudin ultimately turned to a VPN.
Others have brushed off the developments. Denis Dmitriev, a 46-year-old psychologist from Moscow, said he had downloaded MAX after video calls stopped working on WhatsApp and Telegram. So far, he said, he has been satisfied with the service, regardless of any surveillance risk.
“My attitude is that you have to live in a way that you have nothing to hide,” he said.
Mr. Dmitriev said he supported the development of Russian alternatives to widely used foreign apps, noting the aggressiveness of Western sanctions on Russia in recent years. He said he had been receiving alerts showing that more and more of his contacts were joining MAX.
“Everyone needs time to accept the inevitable,” he said.
More than 45 million people have created MAX accounts, equivalent to nearly a third of the Russian population, the app’s parent company said this month. On average this month, the company said, 18 million people have been using the app daily.
The Russian authorities have presented MAX as a way to tackle online fraudsters who they say are targeting children and other vulnerable people on WhatsApp and Telegram. Russians are largely still able to send messages and voice recordings over those two apps, though some worry that the Russian authorities will one day ban the services entirely.
When the throttling of WhatsApp and Telegram calls began in August, Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications regulator, said that it was partially restricting calls on the services to combat criminal activity and fraud. The interference coincided with a broad push by Moscow for Russians to start using MAX.
A spokesman for WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, said in a statement that the company was “committed to providing private communication to people in Russia, and we continue to work hard to keep our service running.” Telegram, which was founded by two Russian brothers and has its headquarters in the United Arab Emirates, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The restrictions on voice and video calls on those platforms, described to The New York Times by more than a dozen Russians, have created significant hassles. Russians have long used the apps to save money on mobile plans, which often charge per minute or limit call times. The frustrations are compounded by regular mobile-internet outages imposed by Russia to thwart Ukrainian drones.
Some Russians have switched back to making landline or cellular calls, which are unencrypted and easily subject to state surveillance.
While others have begun using VPNs, the authorities have been clamping down on such services by pushing for their removal from app stores and making it illegal to advertise them or use them for access to banned content.
Mr. Dietrich, the expert on the Russian internet, said the Russian authorities would most likely make access to VPNs even more difficult in the future. Already, many less tech-savvy Russians avoid the bother and expense.
In some cases, Russians have sought out alternatives that so far appear to be subject to less interference, such as Zoom and a lesser-known messaging app, Imo.
Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine have reported difficulties keeping in touch with relatives at home because of the limits on WhatsApp and Telegram. But some told The New York Times that they were still able to call one another using Telegram on the front, where there appears to be less interference.
VK, the Russian social network behind MAX, is still building out the app’s functions, with the clear aim of making the platform indispensable for Russians. VK is controlled by the state and a close friend of Mr. Putin’s through a complex ownership structure. The son of Mr. Putin’s first deputy chief of staff is also the chief executive.
Moscow has said that Russians will be able to use MAX to connect with government services, make doctors’ appointments, find homework assignments and talk to local authorities. The service has begun to offer a digital ID that Russians can use in place of a physical one.
To register with MAX, users must have a Russian or Belarusian SIM card, which excludes most foreigners. The app itself looks a lot like Telegram or WhatsApp, with options to make video calls and follow channels.
The push to adopt the app has been particularly aggressive in government institutions, especially schools.
“Conversations About Important Things,” a weekly series of patriotic school lessons mandated by the Russian state, recently included a lesson that described MAX as Russia’s “final step” toward building its “digital sovereignty.”
Some Russian schoolchildren have poked fun on TikTok at the state’s insistence on the app. Other Russians have made videos joking about the surveillance implications, including one clip in which a poster of Mr. Putin surreptitiously appears in a room.
WhatsApp and Telegram both offer end-to-end encryption of calls, but MAX does not. In the Russian app’s legal disclaimer, it warns users that MAX may transfer user data or accounts to state or local government bodies if requested to do so by law.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told the state news agency Tass last month that the Russian authorities could surveil communications on all services, foreign or domestic.
“Any messaging app is a completely transparent system,” Mr. Peskov said. “And the people who use them must understand that they are all transparent — for the intelligence services.”
Paul Sonne is an international correspondent, focusing on Russia and the varied impacts of President Vladimir V. Putin’s domestic and foreign policies, with a focus on the war against Ukraine.
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