Time in Russia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Time in Russia is not a simple matter. The country spans 11 separate time zones, stretching from UTC+02:00 in the far west all the way to UTC+12:00 on the Kamchatka peninsula in the far east. That range covers a ten-hour difference between two corners of the same nation. About 63 percent of Russia's population live under Moscow Time, set at UTC+03:00. But for the remaining third of the country, daily life is governed by one of ten other offsets, each with its own history of political decisions, popular protests, and reversals. How did a single country come to need eleven clocks? And why did Russia abolish, reinstate, and then abolish again its version of daylight saving time across more than a century? The answers reach back to the Russian Empire, a decree issued on a June morning in 1930, and a 20,000-strong petition filed in far-eastern Russia when the government tried to take away a time zone people had lived by for decades.

• 2. Empire and Solar Time

  ›

  Before Russia had standardized time zones, most of the empire ran on solar time, each locality setting its clocks by the sun directly overhead. Moscow Mean Time was introduced on the 1st of January 1880, originally calibrated to GMT+02:30:17. That precise offset reflects Moscow's longitude of 37.6166667 degrees east. Even after that, many parts of Russia kept solar time for several more years rather than adjusting to the capital's standard.

  The empire's time picture had an extraordinary outlier at its western and eastern edges. Congress Poland, the westernmost Russian territory, ran local times as far back as GMT+01:10. At the opposite extreme, Alaska, then known as Russian America, used the Julian calendar, which ran 11 or 12 days behind the Gregorian calendar used elsewhere in Russia. Local times in Alaska reached as far ahead as GMT+15:10. On Saturday, the 7th of October 1867, at 3:30 p.m. local time in the capital of New Archangel (Sitka), Alaska transferred from Russian to American control. That handover closed one of the strangest chapters in Russia's timekeeping geography.

  Russia formally adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918. The transition was abrupt. Wednesday the 31st of January under the old style was followed immediately by Thursday the 14th of February under the new style, deleting 13 days from the calendar in a single step.

• 3. The Decree Hour

  ›

  On the 21st of June 1930, the Soviet government moved all clocks forward by one hour, planning to hold them there only through the end of September. The clocks were never moved back. What began as a temporary summer measure quietly became permanent, and the extra hour accumulated over the years came to be called decree time.

  The stated reason for keeping the clocks forward was practical. Power plants were being overloaded in winter evenings, and running the country an hour ahead of the sun reduced peak electricity demand during those dark hours. The solution proved controversial almost immediately. In 1931, the Supreme Council of the National Economy proposed pushing clocks forward yet another hour, but the State Planning Committee blocked the move. By 1935, planners had drawn up a return to standard time; that plan was never carried out either.

  Decree time proved especially disorienting in regions of the 3rd time zone that switched to Moscow Time during later reforms. Residents who had grown accustomed to Moscow-synchronised television broadcasts found their schedules shifted. The newspapers of the day documented the frustration directly, quoting letters from viewers who complained they now sat down in front of their sets an hour later than the local time count required. "Hence the many letters asking to restore the previous order," the press noted at the time.

• 4. Soviet Reforms and Unraveling

  ›

  From the 1st of April 1981, the Soviet Union introduced regular seasonal clock changes. Summer time added yet another hour on top of decree time in many regions, meaning that by mid-summer, average solar noon in the west of Novosibirsk and Tomsk fell at 15:00, and in the west of Altai Krai at 14:48. Clocks and sun had drifted far apart.

  On the 1st of October 1981, about 30 regions of the RSFSR did not move their clocks back as scheduled, aiming to ease the transition to summer time the following spring. Popular discontent was swift and forceful enough that those regions reversed course by the following autumn, returning to their previous winter time. The whole experiment lasted only from October 1981 to April 1982.

  By the late 1980s, individual regions began opting out of decree time rather than waiting for central direction. Volgograd and Saratov shifted to the neighboring western zone in 1988. In 1989 a cluster of regions followed, including the Baltic SSRs and Astrakhan, Kaliningrad, and Kirov. On the 31st of March 1991, the Soviet government officially abolished decree time across the USSR, with exceptions for Turkmenistan and parts of Uzbekistan. The abolition coincided directly with the period of the USSR's collapse, and in some republics the two processes became entangled. On the 23rd of October 1991, the Council of the Republic of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR ordered the government to restore daylight saving time, declaring that the September 1991 clock change had caused population discontent and measurably increased electricity consumption.

• 5. The Russian Federation's Restless Clocks

  ›

  After 1991, Russia inherited a patchwork of time zone rules and spent the following decades rearranging them. On the 20th of October 1991, Samara Oblast shifted from Moscow Time to MSK+1, effectively reinstating Samara Time. On the 19th of January 1992, decree time was reintroduced. Over the next decade, individual oblasts continued adjusting. Novosibirsk Oblast shifted from MSK+4 to MSK+3 on the 23rd of May 1993. Altai Krai and Altai Republic followed on the 28th of May 1995. Sakhalin Oblast moved on the 30th of March 1997, and Tomsk Oblast adjusted in May 2002.

  The most sweeping change of the post-Soviet era came through Decree No. 725 of the 31st of August 2011. Moscow Time shifted to UTC+04:00 all year, decree time and daylight saving time were formally abolished, and several parts of the Sakha Republic changed their offsets from Moscow. Oymyakonsky District moved from Magadan Time at MSK+8 to Vladivostok Time at MSK+7.

  The 2011 change proved unpopular. In far-eastern Russia, opposition was organized and documented. A petition of 20,000 signatures called for Kamchatka to return to UTC+12:00 after it was moved to UTC+11:00 in March 2010. In July 2014, following further legislation, almost all of Russia moved back one hour and Moscow Time returned to UTC+03:00. Kamchatka Krai and Chukotka remained at UTC+12:00, reinstating Kamchatka Time. The 26th of October 2014 marked Russia's last clock change; daylight saving time has not been observed since.

• 6. Crimea, Annexations, and Railway Time

  ›

  Russia's political boundaries altered its time map twice in the 2010s and 2020s. On the 29th of March 2014, local authorities in the newly annexed Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol ordered clocks to jump ahead two hours at 22:00, moving from Eastern European Time at UTC+02:00 to Moscow Time, then still running at UTC+04:00. After the October 2014 rollback, these territories settled at UTC+03:00 with the rest of Moscow Time.

  Following the annexation of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in September 2022, the parts of those territories under Russian administration remained on Moscow Time at UTC+03:00 rather than reverting to UTC+02:00 with the rest of Ukraine when Ukrainian daylight saving time ended in October 2022. In April 2023, Russian law was formally amended to include those oblasts within Moscow Time.

  Until 2018, Russian Railways operated all its timetables on Moscow Time, regardless of local time at either end of a journey. Passengers boarding a train in Vladivostok consulted a Moscow clock to know when it departed. From 2018, railway timetables switched to local time. Airports and flights had already followed local time throughout. The railway change closed one of the last surviving institutional uses of a single national time reference across all 11 zones.

• 7. Eleven Zones Today

  ›

  Since the 27th of December 2020, Russia's 11 time zones have held their current configuration. Kaliningrad Time at UTC+02:00 covers Kaliningrad Oblast, home to just over a million people. Moscow Time at UTC+03:00 is by far the largest, covering most of European Russia and a population of more than 90 million. Samara Time at UTC+04:00 covers five oblasts and republics, including Udmurtia. Yekaterinburg Time at UTC+05:00 spans nine subjects with a combined population of more than 20 million. The five remaining zones carry progressively smaller populations eastward, down to Kamchatka Time at UTC+12:00 covering Chukotka and Kamchatka Krai, which together hold fewer than 340,000 people.

  The tz database, the technical standard that software around the world uses to handle time zones, records 27 separate zones for Russia rather than 11. Two federal subjects appear in more than one tz zone. The Sakha Republic is divided into three: western, central, and eastern. Sakhalin Oblast is divided into two, split between Sakhalin Island and the Severo-Kurilsky District. A deleted identifier, Asia/Ulan_Ude, once represented Buryatia separately; it appeared in the 2011e edition of the database and was removed by edition 2011i, with the area folded back into Asia/Irkutsk. The gap between the political count of 11 and the technical count of 27 reflects a history dense enough that software engineers still need a separate entry for every distinct rule change since 1970.