The president, Vladimir Putin, sent Obama an official telegram, the contents of which were not disclosed, to mark Obama’s re-election.

“In general the Kremlin received the news about Barack Obama’s election victory very positively,” said Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, the Interfax news agency reported. “We are hoping for a positive start to the two-sided relationship and cooperation between Russia and the US.”

There has been relatively little interest in the US elections in Russia, with a widespread belief that the outcome is unlikely to have much effect on relations between the two countries.

Russia’s leading television channel, Perviy Kanal, showed a cooking programme during Obama’s acceptance speech, which took place in the middle of the morning in Moscow. And reports about a drunken shooting spree in a Moscow warehouse that killed five people was ahead of the US elections at the top of many news bulletins through the day.

But the prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, was outspoken in his relief at Obama’s victory over Romney, who described Russia, in a now infamous remark, as the US’s “number-one geopolitical foe” during campaigning earlier this year. “I am happy that the president of the biggest and most influential state in the world will not be a person who thinks Russia is the number-one enemy: that’s paranoia.”

Both officials and opposition politicians appeared pleased by Romney’s defeat. Romney had advocated “the practical return to the foreign policies of President George Bush the younger,” said Alexei Pushkov, the ruling United Russia party’s chairman of the Duma’s international affairs committee, RIA-Novosti reported.

And the former deputy energy minister and opposition activist Vladimir Milov wrote on Twitter that “the hope that Romney would have been tough with Putin was very naïve. Romney and Putin would have been best of friends.”

But not all commentators were welcoming. The head of the Kremlin-friendly Liberal Democrat party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said Obama’s re-election was the start of a “slow self-isolation” for the US and that it meant the country was “doomed to stagnation”.

The US ambassador in Moscow, Michael McFaul, who is a close associate of Obama and a mastermind of his ‘reset’ policy with Russia, said Obama was likely to visit Russia in 2013. — The Guardian, London

Social networks have been the tool of choice for opposition activists since street demonstrations broke out in December, but the popularity of the Internet in Russia means any Chinese-style attempt to assert control from above would be doomed.

So the authorities appear to have been forced to play the socially networked activists at their own game.

Government minister Mikhail Abyzov told the Izvestia newspaper that the network, which is intended to go live in June and to attract private capital, would be created from an existing site called russiawithoutidiots.rf. Set up earlier this year with the support of the then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, the site allows users to complain about civil servants.

The initiative is also part of an agenda pushed by Medvedev, who is now prime minister, to build the role of e-government in Russia. Last month, Medvedev forced all his ministers to use iPads, and dispensed with paper during cabinet meetings.

But analysts are sceptical that a Kremlin social network could ever rival international brands such as Facebook and Twitter and their popular Russian equivalents, Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki.

“If the government creates some form of social network, then people will not join it,” said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services and the Internet. “It is not realistic.”

Russia’s vocal opposition movement is heard loudest online. Aleksei Navalny, one of the most popular critics of the president, Vladimir Putin, became famous through his blog.

The Kremlin is just the latest Russian institution that has been forced to confront social media in recent months. In May, Patriarch Kyrill, the 65-year-old head of the Russian Orthodox church, launched a Facebook page after a series of scandals put him at the centre of a storm of Internet criticism.

Despite Putin’s protestation that he is too busy with work to use the Internet with any regularity, Russia recently overtook Germany to become the European country with the most Internet users.

“If the authorities do not like what is happening on the Internet there is only one way of resisting,” Putin said when asked his opinion on the Internet last year. “On the same Internet platform you have to propose different answers … and collect a larger amount of supporters.” — The Guardian, London