By Murad Rakhimov | 2025-12-05

As Russia tightens control over its digital borders, public support for a more sealed-off Internet remains strikingly thin.

According to a November survey conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, only 24% of respondents supported restricting access to foreign social networks and messaging apps, while 40% opposed the move.

Asked what the blocks changed in their daily routines, people most often pointed to difficulty finding information, staying in touch with loved ones and losing access to YouTube.

Younger Russians voiced the strongest resistance.

Fifty-eight percent of "Zoomers" and 68% of younger millennials rejected additional limits. Their views reflect broader doubts about the government's claim that foreign platform blocks have strengthened domestic services.

Only one-third of respondents believed Russian platforms benefited, about the same share said the restrictions made no difference, and 16% said domestic services "have only lost" as a result.

The survey also suggested, however, that frustration has not yet led to widespread attempts to bypass restrictions. Twenty-two percent viewed such workarounds favorably, while 17% viewed them negatively.

Youth against censorship

Alisher Ilkhamov, director of Central Asia Due Diligence in London, said the survey results reflected a broader pattern: people in any country tend to react similarly when governments restrict access to the internet and social media.

"Young people are more negative than the older generation about restrictions on their freedom. These people were formed amid daily consumption of online information," he told Kontur.

Ilkhamov said he did not expect that frustration to translate into protest. He drew a parallel to the late Soviet period, noting that mass demonstrations emerged only during perestroika, when economic decline combined with loosened political controls.

Before that, he said, young people turned to alternative cultures shaped partly by Western mass media, supported by a thriving black market.

"And something similar will happen now. Young people will find ways to circumvent the restrictions," Ilkhamov said.

Political scientist Anvar Nazirov agreed.

"I don't see anything in this that would cause any protests, demonstrations, or people to take to the streets. Russia will most likely create its own sovereign internet, like North Korea," he told Kontur.

Shunning the state messenger

Russian authorities have cast the replacement of foreign apps with domestic platforms as a central step toward "internet sovereignty." Under that plan, VKontakte is expected to edge out Facebook, X and Instagram, Rutube is meant to serve as a substitute for YouTube, and the new messenger Max is intended to take the place of WhatsApp and Telegram.

On November 12, 2025, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin pressed officials to speed up Max's integration with the Gosuslugi government portal.

Touring the Digital Solutions exhibition, he stopped at the Gosuslugi stand and asked Deputy Digital Development Minister Sergey Tsvetkov about the status of routing requests through Max. Mishustin reminded him that all data must eventually go through the app. Although Tsvetkov said the first integrations were complete, Mishustin ordered the work accelerated and the list of services expanded.

The government approved Max in July as Russia's national messaging app, envisioned as a single gateway for multiple state and commercial services. Implementation has lagged, in part because the Federal Security Service reportedly demanded certified cryptosecurity tools before allowing Max to connect to Gosuslugi.

Max has nonetheless become mandatory.

As of September 1, the app must be preinstalled on all devices sold in Russia, and authorities began pushing it into schools at the start of the academic year. But uptake has been low.

Social anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova said in her Telegram post in November that neither teachers nor parents nor students wanted to install it.

At a meeting of the Moscow Department of Education, officials were shown what Arkhipova described as catastrophic figures: only 7% of students in the capital had installed Max, compared with 20% of parents and 62% of school staff.

Arkhipova said principals would face pressure to raise those numbers. In an article for iStories, she described how students have resisted the rollout by asking parents for dumbphones, spoofing the app’s icon or claiming their phones lacked the memory to run it.

"Surveillance of correspondence - that's what worries Russian schoolchildren most," she wrote. She added that "anti-Max horror stories and jokes" spreading among children showed their fear of digital identity control and amounted to a response by "digital natives" to official messaging campaigns and pressure tactics.

Mimicking DPRK isolation

The mandate to move Russia's digital communications onto Max extends far beyond schools and universities. It will also reach the housing and utilities sector, covering nearly 1 million apartment buildings. Russian Construction, Housing and Utilities Minister Irek Fayzullin announced in last month that all apartment-building group chats in the country must be moved to the Max messenger.

Fayzullin said President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government ordered the shift. Chats previously hosted in Telegram and WhatsApp must be moved, and once transferred, each group in Max must be designated as an apartment-building chat. He did not explain how officials planned to ensure every chat made the transition.

Political scientist Anvar Nazirov said adults were likely to accept these measures quietly.

"People will quickly get used to monitored messengers like Max and will live in their own sovereign internet space," he told Kontur, adding that support for the restrictions would resemble public acceptance in North Korea.

The shift has already complicated communication for millions.

In August, Roskomnadzor restricted voice and video calls on Telegram and WhatsApp, officially to curb fraud. The result, however, was the loss of a widely used and inexpensive channel for staying in touch.

This latest phase of the "sovereignization" of Russia's internet has drawn limited national media attention but has been actively discussed on social networks, especially in the post-Soviet region.

Many residents of former Soviet republics rely on stable connections with relatives in Russia, including students, migrant workers and the large number of émigrés who left after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

One émigré, 30-year-old Andrey, who asked to remain anonymous, left Saint Petersburg for Tashkent during Russia's fall mobilization in 2022.

"It's become much more difficult to contact my parents, who live in the Leningrad Region," he told Kontur. "Previously, we used Telegram. But now it's only for text messages."

He said VPNs offered inconsistent help, with connection quality varying by region and mobile operator. Reaching people near airports or other strategic sites -- areas Ukraine considers legitimate military targets -- had become even more unreliable.

Andrey's sister, who lives in Russia, told Kontur she now uses Google Meet to communicate with him.

"I'm trying not to install this [expletive] [Max] until unavoidable," she added.