15 August 2025
By Aleksandr Podrabinek
Source: Radio Svoboda
What else can we call the people infringing on the well-being of the greater part of Russia’s adult population? And not only the adults. Roskomnadzor has admitted that it is blocking the voice apps WhatsApp and Telegram. Each of these message apps has a monthly audience of nearly 100 million people. You might say the entire country uses this app, and everyone is satisfied. Everyone except the crazy Russian regime and possibly cell communications operators angry about the drain of their clients.
The reasons for the attack on society are obvious. The repressive organs are incapable of effectively controlling people’s communications. They are desperate to know who is talking to whom and about what, who breathes what and is planning to do what, who it’s now time to put in prison, and who else they can surveille. The owners of the message apps are either refusing to agree or agreeing reluctantly to talk to the special services. Therefore the regime is forcing people to switch to a national message app, Max, created in the interests of state security. Everything gets listened to, recorded, and registered and at the right moment is put on the investigator’s desk and then stitched into a criminal case.
As the saying goes, there are lots of explanations but just one reason. Roskomnadzor accuses the message apps of being used ‘for deception and extortion and to lure Russian citizens into sabotage and terrorist activities’. The Digital Ministry states that they will restore voice calling on Telegram and WhatsApp if the apps’ owners ‘start observing Russian legislation’. That is, share information at the request of law enforcement agencies. TelecomDaily commented that the restrictions introduced by Rosomnadzor have already allowed mobile operators to increase their voice calling by 10-20 percent. Someone has to make money off of people’s misfortunes! If we take all these explanations on faith, then it remains incomprehensible whether this is all because of telephone fraudsters, nonlaw-abiding owners, or simply for the sake of mobile operators’ profit. The abundance of obscure explanations always masks the one genuine one.
For now there are few means for fighting this adversity. It has been noted that if both subscribers have a VPN, voice calling on WhatsApp works. But this solution is almost certainly temporary. The right thing, of course, would be to break up Roskomnadzor and charge its directors under Article 136 of the Russian Criminal Code for ‘Violation of the equal rights of the individual and citizen’ (by the way, up to five years’ imprisonment). But that is a matter for the future. Of course, the instigators are going to dump everything on the providers, and the providers are going to point fingers back at the instigators. I have no questions for the instigators, who await popular vengeance.
But what about the providers—the IT specialists, high-level scientists, engineers, and programmers? How do they feel about their work on the regime’s mission to insult the country’s population? It’s a rhetorical question, and most important, a question not asked for the first time. How did the nuclear physicists who armed the Soviet regime with an atomic weapon feel about their work? What were the Soviet microbiologists who created lethal bacteriological weaponry thinking? After all, without their minds, the regime would have been left mindless.
We associate the term ‘enemy of the people’ primarily with the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. But before that it had been widely used during the Great French Revolution, and even earlier in the Roman republic. This concept has been mercilessly manipulated, but it has always signified people who oppose the entire nation. In our case, it refers ideally to Rosomnadzor and those who stand behind it.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
