Apple defies Russian government, restores opposition voting app

Enlarge / Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's "Smart Voting" app. (credit: Natalia Kolesnikova/Getty Images)

Apple has restored an app sponsored by Alexei Navalny, a prominent leader of Russia's political opposition, to the company's Russian app store. Apple took down the app last September, days before Russia's legislative elections, under pressure from the Russian government.

Russian voters went to the polls last September to elect representatives to five-year terms in the Duma, Russia's legislature. Russia does not have free and fair elections, so no one expected Putin's party, United Russia, to lose its majority. But opposition figures like Navalny still saw the election as an important opportunity to register public disapproval of Putin's regime. To help Russia's fractious opposition parties coordinate, Navalny created an app that listed endorsements for hundreds of candidates.

The Washington Post reported that days before the election, the Russian government sent agents to the homes of top Apple and Google executives in Russia, demanding that Navalny's app be removed from the companies' app stores. Russian authorities claimed that Navalny's group was an "extremist" organization. If Apple and Google failed to comply within 24 hours, the government said, their Russian executives would go to prison.

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