МАХофон ~ Word of the Month

This is our new monthly language column that has taken the reins over from our long-running Survival Russian column in the magazine. Each month we focus on a word or phrase trending in Russian culture and society.

In March, the situation surrounding the state-run messenger MAX – which many Russians have been actively resisting – reached a fever pitch when the state undertook its mass blockage of Telegram.

Telegram is the platform where, after the recent blocking of WhatsApp, most Russians engage in group chats to communicate with schools, colleagues, neighbors, and others. Now, to the displeasure of many users, blocking all alternative apps means that chats are forced to move to MAX (which has been required to be installed on all new phones in Russia since last fall).

What should you do if you’re categorically against MAX, consider it a “pocket Comrade Major,” but your child, for example, attends a soccer club and you can only find out about schedule changes through the “national messenger”? Buy a МАХофон (MAXophone) – a separate smartphone specifically for MAX.

Although the messenger does indeed track users, and is often singled out and demonized, it can lead Russians to forget that most all phone apps, including other state-controlled apps, exist in order to spy on users, collecting, mining, and selling their data. And everyone still uses these apps, from banking services to Yandex Maps andgovernment apps used to to pay for utilities or make doctor appointments. Among political activists and journalists, it has long been a common practice to purchase a separate SIM card and phone. Yet everyone else still keeps everything on their main smartphone (along with those other apps that also spy), along with all their personal data, even if they get a phone specially for MAX.

Until recently, maxophones were something of a novelty, used more for the sake of formal compliance. For example, if you were a government official and required to install MAX, you would buy a phone, install the app, show it to your superiors, turn it off, and put it away in the closet. Yet maxophones are now increasingly necessary in real life – for example, to communicate with elderly relatives (they don’t know how to use a VPN, and, without one, they can no longer access Telegram).

There was hope that one’s maxophone could be left at home (carrying two phones around is inconvenient, and besides, no one wants “Comrade Major” to spy on their movements). But this approach no longer works, since MAX is now the only messenger app included in the states’ “white list” – the limited list of sites that function during internet blackouts. Due to attacks by Ukrainian drones, many regions have long been without mobile internet. And not just border zones, but also those, for example, located near military facilities. Moscow, long immune to such blackouts, recently had an inexplicable and crippling blackout of the mobile internet that transformed daily life. 

“In the morning, one can see a rare sight: people at bus stops are no longer staring at their smartphone screens,” wrote Vedomosti. “Some people are talking to each other, while others are admiring the spring scenery and the unexpectedly bright March sun, which the weather has generously bestowed upon the capital these days.”

Despite calls for a “digital detox” (which is exactly how Vedomosti chose to describe the wartime blackouts), Muscovites aren’t rushing out into nature; instead, they’re looking for ways to buy a budget smartphone. If you visit AVITO, a popular site for buying and selling used items, you can see photos of outdated smartphones with descriptions like “scratches on the screen, old fellow, but works pretty snappy for its age; won’t run games, but suitable for kid`s first introduction to gadgets or as a MAXophone.”