The message came via messenger shortly before the New Year at 7:38 p.m. and it was a threat: Students in the port city of Novorossiysk are no longer allowed to take part in seminars and lectures unless they download the “National Messenger MAX” onto their smartphone: “The electronic certificate booklet will soon only be connected to MAX, which means that you may not be admitted to exams and internships taking place in January.” It’s not just the universities that are affected: a ten-year-old third-grader in the Autostadt Samara on the Volga also complained to her mother about the pressure that her teacher was putting on everyone in the class who didn’t install this app on their cell phone.
The Kremlin is currently doing everything it can to gain control over citizens’ digital interactions via the state app. MAX is heavily advertised in the mostly state-controlled media. This is having an impact: According to the Russian media monitoring company “Mediascope”, the Kremlin app only had around 16.5 million daily users in April and around 50 million at the beginning of December. An extreme increase. And yet the app lags significantly behind the competition, some of which is from abroad.
Whatsapp is still the most used internet service in Russia with 97 million users. The Russian Facebook counterpart vKontakte (In Contact) has almost 94 million users, Telegram has around 90 million users per day.
Spicy: The Whatsapp parent company, the US company Metawhich also includes Instagram, was as well X (formerly Twitter) banned in Russia as “extremist”. Behind vKontakte, on the other hand, is the VK Group, which also developed MAX and is considered loyal to the Kremlin. The group is majority owned by subsidiaries of the state-controlled Gazprom Group and its St. Petersburg companion Kremlherrscher Wladimir PutinYuri Kovalchuk. The managing director is Vladimir Kiriyenko, the son of Sergei Kiriyenko – the deputy head of Putin’s presidential administration. Both Kiriyenkos are on the EU and US sanctions lists.
By law to become a “national messenger”
The increase in the number of users at MAX is not just due to advertising. MAX was declared a “national messenger” by law and must therefore be pre-installed on all smartphones, tablets and notebooks sold in Russia since September 1, 2025. Then the speed of Whatsapp and the Telegram network of the colorful Russian tech billionaire Pavel Durov, who lives in Dubai, was massively throttled.
Recently, state services were only made possible via MAX, such as registration confirmations or vehicle registrations. At least digitally. Until now, the MAX requirement could be circumvented by physically going through the authorities. But now the toughest coercive measures were taken: property managers, state employees and state-controlled companies were instructed to only communicate digitally via MAX. And this is the only way students can get their student ID card. If they refuse to use the app, the situation will be like in the Black Sea city of Novorossiysk: they will be blocked from seminars and exams.
Sarkis Darbinyan, co-founder of the digital rights NGO Roskomsvoboda, sees “unprecedented pressure from the state”. The goal is formulated by MP Sergei Boyarsky: If enough people have switched to MAX, Western competitors in Russia will be switched off, according to the chairman of the State Duma’s Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communication.
MAX could cut people off from their relatives in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine
Another reason for pushing through MAX is, according to “Reporters Without Borders“that the People in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine are cut off from their relatives and acquaintances. And from non-Russian information. “Accessible only via a Russian or Belarusian phone number, the app blocks communication with free Ukraine and collects 100 percent of user data, while also serving as an important propaganda tool.”
Data not secure
The director of the Society for the Protection of the Internet, Mikhail Klimarev, noted that MAX’s privacy policy stipulates that data will be shared with the FSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Tax Service and the Bank of Russia. According to Darbinjan, VK also stores all data and metadata on hard drives that are connected to the FSB secret service. Microsoft subsidiary GitHub, which analyzed the application’s code, reported FSB access to system processes, geolocation, installed programs and the ability to record audio, video and text data.
So far, the Russians have resisted the forced introduction of the “national messenger”. Only 34 percent of Russians are willing to download MAX, according to survey agency ExtremeScan, while 47 percent said they will try to avoid installing it. Many users who fear surveillance install the app on separate, inexpensive gadgets. Russian Internet forums are full of tips on how to avoid downloading MAX. But Darbinjan fears it’s all a matter of time: “Habits change. Maybe in five to ten years the new generation won’t even know that there are other means of communication.”
Since MAX chats are not encrypted, not only the FSB has access, but also fraudsters: “This is a huge security hole that anyone can exploit,” said Darbinyan, whose organization is banned in Russia as a “foreign agent.” Even if the current advertising for the messenger repeatedly claims that MAX cannot be misused by criminals like Western competitors, it is a big plus. Payment services will now also be integrated there – following the example of its Chinese counterpart WeChat. This is likely to benefit not only criminals, but, according to experts, also the government’s tracking of money flows and the detection of donors to organizations that the Kremlin doesn’t like.
Even high-ranking civil servants are now having problems with the MAX requirement: Four months after demonstratively deleting his Telegram account and transferring his channel to MAX, the governor of the Samara region, Vyacheslav Fedorishev, announced on Monday that he would be posting via Telegram again. Experts in Russia call it “safer than the Digital Gulag MAX”.