Russia has a new way to surveil its citizens: a “super app.” Made by the Russian tech company VK, the app is called Max, and as of September 1, it’s required on every new phone sold in Russia. Max enables users to send messages, talk with one another, share files, and transfer money to and from Russian banks. The Kremlin’s ultimate vision for the app is expansive: Citizens will use it to send texts and make calls; parents will communicate with their child’s school; residents will be able to prove their identity to government agencies and businesses. Max’s wide range of uses has prompted analogies to China’s WeChat.
The Kremlin’s goals with the app appear to be twofold: By restricting the use of alternative platforms such as WhatsApp, President Vladimir Putin can continue his effort to construct an independent (in his view, “sovereign”) Russian digital sphere. And though Russia and China have many differences when it comes to technology, the Kremlin still clearly wants for the kind of device-level surveillance that China has achieved; Max represents a step in that direction, offering Putin a new tool to monitor Russians—and even Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territories—in deeper ways.
Putin’s attempts at digital control in Russia started years ago. A number of events—bloggers posting news about the 2008 Russo-Georgian War that clashed with the Kremlin’s version of events, Western media celebrating the Arab Spring as a “Twitter Revolution,” protesters using social media to organize demonstrations against Putin in 2011 and 2012—seem to have convinced Putin that an internet outside state control was a threat to regime security, including in Russia. Where others were awed by the power of online communication and networked protest, he and his advisers apparently saw evidence of a Western plot: In 2014, he infamously called the internet a “CIA project.” From this conspiratorialism have flowed years of censorship, data localization, online-speech criminalization, and other digitally repressive actions by the Kremlin. Foreign-made technology came to be seen as a national-security threat, and foreign companies that refused to censor information, hand over data, or otherwise assist the Russian state were believed to be operating at the behest of Russia’s enemies.
In recent years, the Kremlin has escalated its efforts to swap Western technology for Russian-made replacements, but the results have been mixed. The operating system Astra Linux, built to replace Microsoft Windows, is now widely deployed in Russia. But Russia’s hardware-manufacturing capacity is dismal. In 2021, when Moscow tried to require Russian companies to use Russian-made chips, some told the government that the domestic processors were more expensive, of lower quality, and worse performing than foreign ones. Russian software, in several cases, isn’t much better. The state started pushing hard around 2021 to promote Rutube as an alternative to Google’s YouTube, but adoption has been underwhelming, as evinced by “significant” layoffs that Rutube announced in August. Other video-streaming alternatives have met a similar fate of hype followed by steady decline.
The Max app has at least a slightly higher chance of success. As in the past, the technology isn’t perfect. Some Russians already have complained about Max’s functionality (and mocked VK’s semi-cheesy, semi-effective enlistment of rappers, comedians, and influencers to promote it). One streamer joked that the app’s top selling point is that it … works. But VK is a well-known Russian tech company that successfully built and scaled a platform—also called VK, previously VKontakte—that is often dubbed “Russia’s Facebook.” (In addition to having similar functions as Facebook, VK has a nearly identical interface.) Today, VK is one of the most popular social-media platforms in Russia, used by upwards of 90 million people. Max has just 18 million registrants as of mid-August but is less than a year old.
Perhaps more important to Max’s success is the fact that Russia seems committed to enforcing its use. The state can fairly easily police the requirement that Max be installed on new phones by threatening phone companies that don’t comply or even jailing their executives. And the state is trying to push Russians who bought their phone before September 1 to adopt Max by limiting access to other messenger apps. In August, the Kremlin heavily restricted voice calls on WhatsApp and Telegram for anyone in Russia, citing the platforms’ alleged failure to hand over data to the Russian security services. (Putin hates WhatsApp, as it is owned by Meta, which Russia sees as a tool of American subversion and has formally designated an extremist organization; both Facebook and Instagram are banned in Russia.) The hope seems to be that Russians will eventually give up on these alternatives. Pressuring phone companies and restricting online access to Max alternatives are the most scalable enforcement options for Russia, but the state can always arrest and punish individual people—say, a protester without the app installed, or a journalist still accessing Telegram to spread news—to make an example out of them too.
The potential implications for Russian citizens are extensive. Anything a user does on Max—and everything Max can collect, such as geolocation data, contacts, photos, and audio—could presumably be accessed and exploited by the state. Whatever the state gathers—whether the innocuous, the personal, or the intensely political—could in turn be used for arrests, detentions, fines, disappearances, and much worse. Companies in Russia must comply with legal and extralegal demands from agencies such as the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which has broad authority. VK seems unlikely to resist. Ever since the company’s founder was pushed out and fled Russia in 2014 for resisting Kremlin demands and the company was handed over to Putin allies, VK has been more than pliant in cooperating with the state. Two independent Russian journalists reported in August that the FSB gave Max’s developers specifications for how to handle users’ personal data and demanded to be able to audit the app. (It does not appear that VK or the FSB responded to the report.)
As Max spreads, Russians will have fewer places to have secure conversations online. Their access to nonstate-controlled sources of information could be further constrained. Human rights in Russia will suffer if the surveillance of dissident activity ramps up, and those seeking alternative means of communicating will stand out even more as regime-threatening anomalies. Disturbingly, the Putin regime seems to be applying this coercive approach to digital surveillance in occupied Ukrainian territories. Since October 1, students in the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Oblast, in southeast Ukraine, have been required to use Max and banned from alternatives, according to a Ukrainian human-rights organization. Two people with knowledge of the situation on the ground in the occupied Ukrainian territories told me that the Russians are already slowing down the internet functionality of Telegram and WhatsApp there and forcing phone sellers to have Max preinstalled. Uniformed Russians are also stopping people when they leave the occupied territories to enter Russia and checking to see whether they have Max on their devices, these sources told me. As in Russia, it’s not hard to imagine how failing to download Max could potentially be an excuse for arrest.
Of course, pushing a super app isn’t without risks for the state. It means that much of Russia’s technology ecosystem will have a single point of failure. If Max goes down because an update is buggy, servers break, or someone launches a cyberattack, the app could be offline for some period—in this case, potentially halting millions of bank payments, messages, and identity-verification attempts through the app. And if Max doesn’t work well or doesn’t provide the functionality Russians desire, that could affect public opinion. Memes joking that “Max will come pre-installed on our kettles and fridges” show that some Russians know very well what’s going on. But there is little they can do to stop it.
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