Digital Gulag: Russia Enforces Police Stops To Check If People Have Banned Apps And VPNs On Their Phones, Forces Residents To Use Its Surveillance App MAX
“We have no options now – if you want to make a doctor’s appointment or pay taxes, for example, you have to get it through Max. The code for accessing government services doesn’t come anywhere else.”
Freedom of speech and information inside Russia continues to get more lock tight, as the Kremlin continues to enact austerity measures to prevent citizens from accessing any information or platform that is not permitted by the state.
A clip of a Russian man in the Rostov region went viral after he filmed himself being pulled over by police, and was searched to see if his phone had any banned apps or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) on his phone.
Watch:
The WinePress reported in November that Russia introduced their new all-in-one app called MAX, combining digital ID, social media, banking, medical records and more all in one app. MAX explicitly was designed — per the text of the bill signed by President Vladimir Putin — with China’s WeChat app in mind. WeChat is used to enforce the Communist Chinese Party’s social credit score.
In order to force Russians to accept the app, Russia intensified its crackdown on social media and other non-Western approved, and began banning VPNs.
State Duma member Andrei Svintsov revealed to Gazeta that online anonymity would be completely stripped away if such digital ID verification protocols are implemented.
“A huge number of lobbyists from platforms are slowing down any changes to restore order on the Internet. But in a certain future — three, maximum five years, — everything we do on the Internet will be de-anonymized, that is, each subscriber on the Internet will register through some specialized identifier, which will confirm his age and some other necessary access.
“An analogue of “State Services” — when you are a verified user, it opens up the widest possible set of functionality for you. I think it’s time to introduce something similar to cleanse all social networks, platforms from these bots, from the various limitless amount of content generated.
“Very quickly, the internet turns into a dead internet, where bots generate content, bots put it on various fake pages, and the feed is already filled with some generated content that has no real live author. That is, all these are bot farms.
“All this will grow in the coming years, and, of course, both the platforms themselves and society will simply require everyone to implement such systems of protection against unwanted content, illegal content and content that does not have a human author, but simply has a system for producing content. This needs to be limited, otherwise we will simply lose any point in using social networks at all, because there will be 99% robotic content, some bots, pages.”
In recent weeks, this information battle has intensified. Despite the VPN ban, more Russians, particularly the younger generations, have made using them a way of life and are afraid to say or do anything digitally without one.
The Moscow Times reported on April 3rd:
“Everyone at school has a VPN,” one teenager told The Moscow Times, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Not just for messengers, but for gaming too.”
Virtual private networks (VPNs) have become an everyday necessity for millions of Russians as the government has restricted foreign social media platforms, messaging apps and independent media. The authorities have ramped up efforts to block VPNs as their popularity has grown — but the number of users continues to rise.
One Moscow resident said she had to switch on her VPN even to give a comment. “You’d better ask how this is affecting my nerves,” she said.
Russians using the internet today must navigate ever-widening restrictions, with the total number of blacklisted websites now standing at 4.7 million.
A 29-year-old social media marketer from the Far East republic of Sakha told The Moscow Times that her job requires her to use VPNs to access Instagram and other restricted platforms like YouTube. She typically downloads a new VPN service every six months whenever her current one gets blocked, she said.
It is difficult to determine exactly how many people use VPNs in Russia. App download numbers are not a reliable way to estimate user numbers, as many people download multiple VPNs as backups. Some estimates suggest Russia ranks second globally in VPN usage, with about 37.6% of internet users relying on them.
By mid-January, [State communications watchdog] Roskomnadzor had restricted access to more than 400 VPNs. Russia’s App Store also removed several VPN apps at Roskomnadzor’s request this month. Russian law bans advertising VPN services, with fines of up to 150,000 rubles ($1,846) for individuals and 500,000 rubles ($6,153) for companies.
From Wednesday, the authorities blocked topping up Apple ID balances using mobile phone accounts — one of the most popular payment methods in the Apple Store since international payment services like Visa and MasterCard suspended operations in Russia in 2022. Moscow residents confirmed to The Moscow Times that they were unable to transfer money from their mobile phone balances to their Apple ID accounts.
Separately, mobile operators could start charging up to 150 rubles ($1.80) per gigabyte for using more than 15 GB of international data routed through VPNs per month, according to reports by Forbes Russia and BBC Russian.
“The internet is becoming something only the wealthy can afford,” expert Eldar Murtazin told the pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda. “Most likely, prohibitive pricing will be introduced so that people give up [VPNs] for financial reasons. This will lead to everyone being confined to the Russian internet.”
The Digital Development Ministry has asked major platforms, including banks and marketplaces, to block users accessing services via VPNs or risk losing their spots on the government “white list” of essential sites accessible during outages, Kommersant reported.
The information and internet crackdown has been labeled as “hysteria,” according to Russian State Duma Deputy Mikhail Matveev, adding that the Kremlin is building a “digital concentration camp.”
“We have a lot of hypocrisy on the part of our government. For example, when officials who call for giving up everything imported themselves prefer imported ones, or deputies buy the latest models of iPhones. Or when people who call Telegram enemy subscribe to it themselves, when the head of the largest domestic automobile plant himself drives a foreign car.
“When all this starts to fall apart, the people who came up with it all will step aside and pretend that they have nothing to do with it.”
Outages and “throttling” — forcing very slow load times so the user gives up waiting for the site to paginate — continue to occur in some regions, and it is believed by some that this is because the government is strangling what Russians can access.
“We practically have no mobile internet now,” Diana, a St Petersburg teacher in her mid-30s, told Al Jazeera.
“That means you can’t use maps, apps, or anything. And in Moscow, you can’t even call from downtown. The phone’s just turned into a brick. Yes, and you can only pay for anything in cash. In short, you feel like you’re 20 years in the past.”
Diana said she and other Russians are being squeezed into using MAX.
“We have no options now – if you want to make a doctor’s appointment or pay taxes, for example, you have to get it through Max. The code for accessing government services doesn’t come anywhere else.”
Anastasiya Zhyrmont, policy manager for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the digital rights group Access Now, told Al Jazeera:
“By restricting access to external platforms, the state reduces exposure to independent reporting and alternative viewpoints, reinforcing its ability to shape public narratives for propaganda purposes.”
“This creates a tightly managed digital space where access to information is filtered, controlled and, when necessary, suppressed. In that sense, the ‘sovereign internet’ is not just about digital autonomy – it is about information control, enabling propaganda, surveillance and censorship at scale.
“At the request of Roskomnadzor, Apple quietly removed dozens of VPN services from the Russian app store, and independent monitoring found nearly 100 apps effectively unavailable. On the technical side, Russian filtering infrastructure can detect and block many popular VPN protocols.”
She warned that MAX is a mass-surveillance tool.
“Max does not merely record user messages or metadata. MAX can report your real-time movements – a tool that, in repressive conditions, can expose attendance at protests, political gatherings, or simply trace your personal contacts and mobility. The app is reportedly capable of more invasive operations: silently activating the microphone, camera or screen-recording, even when the user believes the app is idle.”
Because of this crackdown, the government is using this to carry out ulterior motives.
As documented by Edward Slavsquat:
To make a long (and ongoing) story short, authorities are killing the livestock of small farms in several regions of Siberia, purportedly to stop the spread of diseases (without bothering to test any of the animals before killing them). The farmers have been compensated with paltry sums that are only a fraction of the actual market value of their animals. Many are unable to purchase new animals and are now financially ruined.
When farmers began to share videos of their cows being slaughtered for no reason, authorities resorted to traditional terror and intimidation tactics.
When that didn’t work, the regional government claimed videos documenting the insane cow-slaughter were AI-generated fakes.
Meanwhile, the livestock of large and politically well-connected corporate farming operations in the area have remained untouched.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Communications, according to Izvestia, is proposing to ban a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that would effectively kill smaller companies in the country.
The new requirements include steeper license fees, larger minimum operational liquidity, and obligatory deployment of the FSB’s SORM traffic interception equipment.
Taken together, the proposed measures will lead to a reduction in the number of small communications companies and market consolidation, says Alkhas Mirzabekov, general director of the Moscow operator ESK.
“On the one hand, it will be easier for the state to monitor compliance by remaining operators with licensing conditions and other industry requirements, such as those related to connections to SORM. On the other hand, — this will lead to a decrease in competition in the market and, ultimately, to an increase in tariffs for home Internet and pay TV,” he noted.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Hosea 12:7 He is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress.
“Free” Russia, huh?
Of course, if you listen to all the Pro-BRICS and Pro-Russian shills in the so-called alternative media — the likes of Tucker Carlson, Jeffrey Sachs, Jimmy Dore, Scott Ritter, Col. Douglas MacGregor, Pepe Escobar, Judge Andrew Napolitano, etc. — they would have to think about how great Russia is, and their proud nationalism and historic Christian Orthodoxy, that they are a beacon against the Great Reset class in Brussels and Davos and D.C.
Oh, really? Explain this then.
They won’t. They will continue to gatekeep with their Hegelian Dialectic narratives, telling some truth and pointing out Western problems (for which there are many; and yes, the United States is an evil empire), but then act as if Russia, China, India, Iran, Brazil, etc. are totally innocent and guiltless, and any problems that do occur are because of Western meddling.
The truth is, these pundits, paid shills, and operatives are there to push people into the ‘loving’ arms of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and other globalist institutions.
That’s not an exaggeration: just read the Kazan and Rio de Janeiro Declarations signed by the BRICS nations, as it clearly reads like the G20 statements and declares it wants the UN and IMF as the heads of global government and finance.
That’s the bait & switch: get everyone to hate the current state of affairs in the West (and for good reason), crash it, and then offer Globalization 2.0 in the form of multipolarity; mass-surveillance, tokenized ball & chain slavery, dietary and meat restrictions, SMART everything, social credit scores, carbon taxes, etc., etc.
There have been others I used to recommend before I realized that they were pushing pro-UN semantics. Will they ever talk about these things that I just listed? Of course not.
What Al-Jazeera reported about MAX should not be overlooked because, as I reported last year, MAX is designed to emulate China’s WeChat; and here in the U.S., Elon Musk has said that he wants to transform X into an app just like WeChat, with tokenized money and everything.
It’s happening everywhere…
It’s getting harder to see what goes on inside Russia because both Russian and Western nations are banning each others’ media and information access, but there are still some Russian channels I subscribe to get an idea of what they think over there.
It’s not as black and white as the Western controlled hacks would have us believe. Some in Russia swallow whatever Putin says, but there are many who also recognize that they are living in a totalitarian state. 1420 by Daniil Orain has some good interviews he does that provide a different perspective as to what’s going on over there. Edward Slavsquat is another good one.
But these various opinions are not presented in these fake, “alternative” media shows. They are force-feeding UN propaganda with truth mingled with lies and misnomers. But trust them because they are the “experts.” Or how about these military “experts” who told us repeatedly that the war in Ukraine ‘would be over in a week’ — and we’re past year 4 and these people are still telling us the war is soon to finally break.
Proverbs 4:24 Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee. [25] Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. [26] Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. [27] Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil.
If ‘truth’ is presented in a linear, right or left, this or that type of way, that’s almost always a giveaway that you are being played with.
But imagine driving down the street and the police pull you over so they can rummage through your phone to see if you have banned apps and VPNs. Pure utter insanity.
The Fourth Amendment in the U.S. is supposed to protect that from happening, but the Trump administration has shown that they do not care about that.
And what about the livestock going into Russia? Sounds like the same bird flu crap they are peddling in the U.S. Sounds pretty WEF’ian to me…
Bottom line is that the whole world is operating under this Great Reset. Nothing is ever as it seems, especially nowadays. Do not take what you hear and see at face value.
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The Lord Of Glory: The Detailed Guide To Who God Is – Available Now!
On one of his missionary journeys, the apostle Paul visited Athens, Greece, where he said he witnessed “the city wholly given to idolatry,” and who were “too superstitious” and worshipped a plurality of gods and deities, though the people acknowledged that there was still one God above all that was a mystery to them. When questioned by the philosophers …
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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I used to recommend a channel for a couple of years, "World Affairs in Context" (Lena Petrova), but she went totally in defense of BRICS and openly defended and lied for the UN. She used to do some good work, but it's turned into selective reporting and lying.
I used to promote her stuff because it was good, but something happened in 2024 when her messaging started to change, and then it turned into biased reporting, promoting Marxists and the UN, and even having people formerly from the IMF on her show. It's crazy because she used to expose that stuff, so I don't know what happened exactly, but she appears to have sold-out. So, for that and other reasons, I don't share her stuff anymore.
One of the biggest fears I have is that when people here start turning in each other more.
I always worry about my animals getting taken away
Keep thinking to move into more rural area
We have flock cameras everywhere, a few miles apart on some roads around here.
Facebook posts of people complaining about what there neighbor is doing, somebody's dog is loose, a rooster in the road, kids riding bikes in the street etc etc etc non stop
I have free ranging guineas that a few people dont like, they dont realize the tick population is nonexistent in our neighborhood tho
Somebody shot a gun the other night at 9 30 pm because of an animal in their yard, minutes later the sheriffs are driving around with the spotlights on. I am in a semi rural area, getting crowded in from developments, everywhere around me you need 1 acre of land to discharge any firearm, we are all over 2 acres, so common sense says it is ok here
People are slowly turning on each other all for the "good of the people"
Just does NOT stop and it appears the majority of the people do not understand what all of the laws they are wanting for our "safety" is creating.
Getting corralled