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It has fuelled Iran’s Green Revolution, helped brew protests in Moldova and brought a new Kyrgyz administration to power.  And now for Twitter’s biggest challenge yet: the annals of Russian bureaucracy.

As the Russian daily Vedomosti reports today, the government appears to be catching on to social networking, a surprising feat for bureaucrats that seem intent on remaining as secret and opaque as possible.

While most of Russia’s state organs seem to have missed the invention of email-insisting that all interview requests from journalists, for instance, be stamped and sent by fax or carrier pigeon-they are happily opening up Twitter accounts.

In the past month, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service and the Federal Financial Market Service have both joined the the global Twitterati, and the Kremlin has promised to follow suit. What’s most strange is the reasoning Russia’s anti-monopoly service gave. When questioned it replied this was “experiment” to make information “more widely available”.

Could this be the end of Soviet red tape as we know it?

No need to get too excited – the first few posts from the anti-monopoly service and markets regulator don’t look too promising, but the effort by the latter at least appears to be a sincere one. It has created its Twitter account at a time when it is actively trying to improve not only its own transparency but the transparency of the notoriously murky Russian markets.

The most recent post from Federal Financial Markets Service informs readers, “The Russian Federal Financial Markets Services had a working group meeting to prepare legislative amendments for the rights for bonds”

Slightly more exciting is the most recent post from the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service; “Yargorelektroset [a regional utility] was fined 3.5 million rubles for incorrectly calculating the fees for increasing its capacity”

Since the collapse of Moscow’s exchanges during the nervous days of 2008, the regulator has taken up the country’s first legislation against insider trading and market manipulation, as well as a law that would allow investors to file class-action lawsuits, a sore point for bondholders during the crisis.

Some recent decisions, such as the stricter limits on the amount of capital companies are allowed to list abroad, have rankled western investors, but the fact that the regulator is finally communicating at all is seen as a good start.

Will they be pleased enough to read snore-worthy tweets on new administrative penalties and the regulator’s take on derivatives? Well, that’s another story.

For now, it looks like Russian mandarins won’t be joining the global Twitterati anytime soon.

Related reading:
Twitter: Not just for the masses anymore, Newsweek
Federal Anti-Monopoly Service on Twitter
Federal Financial Markets Service on Twitter