Kremlinology in 140 Characters or Less

Standing beside Twitter’s co-founders, Ev Williams and Biz Stone, Russia’s president revved up the Kremlin’s new official account. Jillian West/Twitter Standing beside Twitter’s co-founders, Ev Williams and Biz Stone, Russia’s president revved up the Kremlin’s new official account.

Update | Thursday | 2:38 p.m. On Thursday at the White House, The Associated Press reports, President Barack Obama joked that now that both he and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev are on Twitter, “we may be able to finally throw away those red phones.”

In the old days, Kremlinology took a lot of effort. To start with, aspiring Kremlinologists had to learn Russian and then apply themselves diligently to reading between the lines of intentionally dull official reports on the goings on in Moscow produced by the Soviet-run media.

These days, while the Russian government exerts a powerful sway over state-run media outlets, and independent reporters inside the country run a real risk of being killed for doing their jobs too well, official news releases about the country’s leaders are at least easier to access from outside the country.

The government finances a satellite channel, Russia Today, to broadcast the news from its perspective, 24 hours a day, in English, around the world and online. The Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, even has an English language version of his official Web site, Kremlin.ru.

On Wednesday, during a visit to Silicon Valley, Mr. Medvedev made it even easier to practice at least an amateur version of Kremlinology by opening two new Twitter accounts for the Kremlin — one in Russian and one in English — during a visit to the popular micro-blogging service’s corporate headquarters.

Kremlinologists, alive to the merest hint that Mr. Medvedev does not expect to hold his office for long and expects to give way sooner or later to Vladimir Putin, the former Russian president who is now the country’s prime minister, no doubt took note of the fact that the new Twitter account is not registered in the name of the current president. It identifies the account holder simply as, “Russian President.”

After posting the obligatory first message — “Hello everyone! I’m on Twitter, and this is my first tweet.” — Mr. Medvedev quickly got the hang of the new tool, using it to post several self-referential updates, with links to photographs of himself — with Twitter’s co-founders, Biz Stone and Ev Williams, with Steve Jobs during a visit to Apple and with Russians working in Silicon Valley — and of the view from his hotel room window.

In just a few hours, Mr. Medvedev has managed to attract more than 10,000 followers to both the Russian and English versions of the Kremlin account. Wisely, though, he seems to be exercising caution about whom he is following on the social network. He initially signed up to get feeds from just two other accounts — @BarackObama and @WhiteHouse.

It may be that someone with more experience of the way the network functions has advised him that not all users are really who they claim to be. For instance, there are strong reasons to believe that @putin may not, in fact, be maintained by Mr. Medvedev’s predecessor. Suspicious minds will note that the infrequently updated account is only maintained in English and mainly hosts messages with plaintive, unstatesmanlike thoughts — like, “I feel lonely” — and links to obscure clips from Russian television, like this one, which comes with the note: “will Medvedev ever learn that sweets are dangerous?”