Google Maps is also different from a paper map; if you annotate the latter, nobody else sees your notes. Google Maps allows us to annotate collectively and to create a new kind of common knowledge about the world. With a few exceptions, we are all using the same Google Maps, regardless of our location. Generally, every review is visible to all.
Most people use reviews to seek out pleasures and avoid annoyances. Is the coffee better at this café or that one? Does the food taste as good as it looks in the pictures? Will this dry cleaner ruin my clothes? This is mostly still the case in Russia, even as certain locales attract digital pleas of desperation. In a review for Dodo’s Pizza, a restaurant just down the road from Military Hospital 1602, a user named Aleksandr has informed the world that the food is “always perfectly prepared,” and that “everything is clean, and the staff is polite.”
In recent years, the Russian government has tightened its control over civilians’ digital lives. A few weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin blocked Russians from accessing Facebook, Instagram, and X. Two years later, his government throttled YouTube, and blocked the encrypted-messaging app Signal; this month, it also blocked WhatsApp. Google has not been banned outright, though Google Maps is sometimes disrupted by government meddling. Banned websites could still be accessed by Russians using V.P.N.s—so the government cracked down on V.P.N.s, most of which are now unreliable. Even searching for information online can be risky. Last fall, a man who looked up a Ukrainian military unit was arrested by federal agents and charged with an “illegal internet search”; reports speculated that his internet provider may have passed the contents of his search to Russia’s security service.
Instead of Western online tools, the Russian government encourages the use of domestic alternatives: VKontakte instead of Facebook, Max instead of Signal, Yandex instead of Google. Yandex, a search engine that was founded at around the same time as Google, in the nineteen-nineties, and offers its own maps service—Yandex Maps—has been a frequent target of Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, whose job is to “ensure stability in society” by monitoring and censoring media, according to the regulator’s website.
Compliance comes in many forms; Yandex has removed images of bombed-out houses in Mariupol, deleted a pin that marked the grave of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and stopped displaying search results from news sites that have been blacklisted by the government. But censorship can have unintended effects. Last summer, Yandex followed orders from the Defence Ministry to blur the sites of military facilities in Moscow. “At the same time, all these facilities are displayed on Google Maps,” a Ukrainian tech blog reported. “Now, behind the blurred spots, it is perfectly visible where exactly the military-industrial complex enterprises are located.”
On Google Maps, Rostov is easy to find by zooming in to the area where the Russian border meets the Azov Sea. On Yandex, it’s harder to use this method. In 2022, Yandex Maps stopped displaying borders—not just between Russia and its occupied territories in Ukraine but everywhere. “The emphasis will be on natural features, not state borders,” the company said.
Rostov is one of the largest Russian cities near the Ukrainian border, a military town that is home to about a million people. Many of the residents are veterans of Russia’s wars—men who fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. Its proximity to the border makes it vulnerable to Ukrainian drone attacks, which routinely target Russian military sites and energy infrastructure. Occasionally, a “drone danger” alert pops up on Rostov residents’ screens. One night in January, the Russian military reportedly shot down twenty-five Ukrainian drones over the Rostov region; one civilian was killed, and the debris from a drone crashed into an apartment block, injuring four others.
