Eighty Percent of Heads of Federal Subjects Now Maintain Social Network Accounts

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 20 – Now that the Kremlin has called on the heads of the federal subjects to make use of social media to communicate with their populations and made it one of the measures of their success, only 17 have failed to do so, according to an investigation by the Petersburg Politics Foundation. 

            Among those who have not taken the plunge are both longtime governors like Anatoly Artamonov of Kaluga and young technocrats like Gleb Nikitin of Nizhny Novogorod, according to Svetlana Bocharova who reports on the study in today’s Vedomosti (vedomosti.ru/politics/articles/2019/02/19/794462-gubernatori-regionov-sotsseti).

                The journalist says that governors began moving toward social networks about the time Dmitry Medvedev became president. And the current prime minister continues to push them to take part, most recently last week at the Sochi Investment Forum.  Bocharova suggests that declining ratings of the powers that be may lead governors to become more active in this regard.

            The most popular social medium among the governors, the study says, is Instagram. Thirty-one heads of federal subjects use it. And the most effective users of it are Perm’s Maksim Reshetnikov and Leningrad Oblast’s Aleksandr Drozdenko.

                Many governors monitor the accounts of other governors. Moscow Oblast’s Andrey Vorobyev and Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov each have 24 governors who follow them online.  Only slightly fewer follow Ingushetia head Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and occupied Crimea head Sergey Aksyonov, who have 19 and 18 other governors following them. 

            That gives these and potentially other governors a new way to reach out to their colleagues as well as to their population. As far as total subscribers are concerned, Chelyabinsk Governor Boris Dubrovsky is the leader. Bochkarova reports that he has 5870 followers on Instagram.

            No uniform approach has been decreed; and as a result, there is great variety in what the governors post or react to. Kurgan’ss Vadim Shumkov welcomes complaints posted on line, Karelia’s Artur Parfenchikov in contrast prefers that people send complaints to his email account. Irkutsk governor Sergey Levchenko doesn’t allow anyone to post comments at all.

            And it appears, the Petersburg Politics Foundation site says, that there is great variation in the amount of time governors spend on social media, with some using it many times a day and others simply putting up a site so they can conform with what the Kremlin wants but doing little more.