Many times in the past I have referred to taxi drivers as a useful source of information. They speak to a lot of people under conditions of anonymity. They gather information from their passengers and share it with the next passengers if they are so disposed in the sure knowledge that they are not identified and can speak freely, which is not the case with your friends and acquaintances. These drivers or hair dressers or others serving the general public and spending enough time together to chat are, as a rule, pretty smart folks and what they say can often prove valuable.
So it was last night when I finally got a car via Yandex Go to take my wife and me plus a couple of friends from our apartment in Pushkin to a restaurant in the neighboring town of Pavlovsk. The driving time was 20 minutes – just enough to share some observations on the state of the internet, the state of the GPS service by which all drivers are guided and related subjects that are close to his… and my heart these days in Russia.
First, the driver instantly agreed with me that the curtailment of internet sites and access has nothing to do with countering Ukrainian drone attacks or assassination plots, as the Putin government is saying publicly. That is a fairy tale for kids, he says. The real reason is to break up communications between the Little People of this country and to ensure that their dissent with the continuation of the damned war on Ukraine is contained and politically neutralized.
That is achieved by shutting down access to foreign news media. It is achieved by shutting down or reducing functionality of the key messenger services that the vast majority of the Russian population was using before the crackdown – like WhatsApp, which was ubiquitous but now is unreliable, no longer supports telephone conversations with any regularity, etc. The same happened to Telegram and other popular Apps. Why? Because these Apps were encrypted and totally secure from the prying eyes of the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB. In their place; the entire population was herded into MAX, a purpose built government controlled App that has zero security of communications from government listeners. Bingo!
When I was in Belgium and read about MAX and its nil security a year ago, frankly I did not pay much attention. But now, combined with the effect of the sharp curtailment of the internet generally here, I see the climb back into the drivers’ seat by the Security Forces and the attack on the sense of personal freedom of everyday Russians.
You will notice that the driver was talking about control of the Little People. As for the Big Boys, corporate and oligarchical Russia, you can be sure they enjoy separate, corporate communicatoins systems that function even today.
Finally, this driver tipped me off about what the Little People are doing to preserve their access to world media and to watertight Apps: per his information, 100 million Russians have installed VPN software on their handheld devices and computers to get around the blockages set up by their internet service providers under instructions from the Security Services.
Well, dear friends, I intend to give this a try, to download one or another VPN and to see if indeed I can restore access to the internet: I will report here on the results of this experiment as they become available.
Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026
Gilbert Doctorow 