beyondbrics

Fitting a message into 140 characters could not be more alien to the political culture of the Kremlin, the institution which perfected the art of the four hour speech.

But Monday, when over 200 grandees crammed into the Georgevsky hall of the Kremlin to hear several long winded reports on higher education by the state commission on modernisation, (most of whose members seemed to be well past 60 years old) it was the humble Twitter messages which stole the show.

First Nikita Belykh, governor of the Kirov region, sent several tweets about his impressions of the yawn inducing proceedings (“several people sitting with Ipads…darned stenographers…or maybe they are doing other things?)

Suddenly President Dmitry Medvedev interrupted a speech to scold Belykh. “There’s Nikita Yurievich Belykh sitting there and writing in Twitter right from the State Council session. Apparently, he’s got nothing better to do.”
Belykh seemed chastened, then tweeted that he had been outed by Kremlin economic adviser Arkady Dvorkovich, “There you go ;(. Dvorkovich leaked my reports to the President. Such are the costs of the information society ;(”

Dvokovich promptly tweeted that his step “wouldn’t have bad consequences” and “livened up the proceedings.”

After the session, Medvedev, Russia’s first Tweeting president, said, apparently in response to Belykh “Yes, those are the costs of the information society. The important thing is that they don’t distract from work, right?”

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Moscow’s bureaucracy turns to Twitter, beyondbrics