Regions Edge Toward Moscow Time

The former superpower Russia will suffer another downsizing this weekend, and at President Dmitry Medvedev's initiative, no less.

The world's biggest country by land mass will shed two of its time zones when daylight saving time is introduced nationwide early Sunday as five regions shift to zones lying to the west — that is, closer to Moscow.

Chukotka and Kamchatka in the Far East, south Siberian Kemerovo as well as Samara and Udmurtia further west, will edge one hour closer to the capital by simply not moving their clocks forward an hour.

The result will be nine contiguous time zones between Moscow and the Pacific Ocean, although the country will still encompass ten zones — ranging from Moscow time minus one hour to Moscow time plus eight hours — when including the Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea.

The initiative came from Medvedev, who surprised observers in his state-of-the-nation address last fall by saying the country should consider reducing its time zones and rethink the logic of daylight saving time.

Officials around the country have eagerly carried out the task, arguing that it would make it easier to communicate with Moscow. And while critics say the switch is a useless issue that only shows the president's political impotence, the only significant opposition so far has been in the Samara region.

The president defended the plan Wednesday, when he told a Kremlin meeting of experts and officials that he came up with the idea after being pressed by the regions.

Reducing time zones, Medvedev argued, would stimulate business and make governing easier.

He added that the Kremlin was studying the further amalgamation of time zones in the Urals and western Siberia. "This is possible but … we need to calculate consequences and monitor all factors, including biological, economic and international," he said.

Some of the leaders of the five regions that will shift this Sunday offered peculiar arguments for the move.

Chukotka Governor Roman Kolpin said being an hour closer to Moscow would allow his people to watch more national television. "Access to educational programs is extremely important given our informational isolation," he said in a statement on his administration's web site.

Located at the country's easternmost tip, opposite Alaska, Chukotka will see its time difference to Moscow reduced from nine hours to eight. The Arctic region was governed by billionaire Roman Abramovich from 2000 to 2008.

Aman Tuleyev, governor of the coal-rich Kemerovo region in southern Siberia, told Medvedev during the Kremlin meeting that reducing the time difference made life easier for people who had been "confused" by the fact that the next time zone to the west was just an hour's drive away.

Tuleyev also lobbied for totally abolishing daylight savings time, arguing that it was bad for both miners and cattle. After each time switch, accidents in coal mines rise sharply while cows will not adjust their milking habits, he said.

"The number of illnesses, primarily cardiovascular ones, rose sharply, mainly among veterans," Tuleyev said, citing several years' data for the month following each jump forward or back.

Medvedev promised to consider abandoning daylight savings time, though he cautioned that this could isolate the country because it is observed practically everywhere in Europe.

Introduced by the Soviet Union in 1981, much later than in Western Europe, daylight saving time remains unpopular among many officials. The State Duma is currently considering a draft law to abandon it, which cites the number of "illnesses, suicides and accidents" it causes.

The most notable opposition came from Samara, a Volga region with some 2.5 million inhabitants.

The switch would eradicate the so-called Samara time zone, one hour ahead of the capital, which hitherto represented two islands on Russia's time zone map, along with the Udmurtia republic further north, which will also adopt Moscow time.

The Samara legislature voted 27-11 for the switch on March 12, but Mikhail Matveyev, an independent deputy, is campaigning against the decision.

"Nobody discussed it with the people. Decisions from the top are not good for a democratic country like Russia," he told The Moscow Times on Thursday.

Locals would miss peculiar traditions around their time zone, Matveyev explained.

People in the region like to celebrate New Year's twice: first according to local time and again one hour later, by Moscow time, he said. "But our political elite does not care about those traditions," he said.

Matveyev also complained that all regional time changes went westward — toward Moscow. "This means setting clocks forward and getting up earlier," he said.

Some in the region must even start two hours earlier: Children in the village of Komsomolsk will have to get up at 5 a.m. to get to their school, located in the Orenburg region, now two time zones to the east, the Mir Television channel reported this week.

An online petition to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, organized by Matveyev on the Girus.ru web site, had garnered nearly 12,500 signatures by late Thursday.

Nikolai Petrov, an analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center, said the time zone initiative was telling for Medvedev's weakness at reforming the political system.

"This is something where he can act totally independent from Putin. But it is a niche pretty much at the fringes of politics," Petrov told The Moscow Times.

Sergei Kravchenko, a Moscow-based psychologist and member of the Nature of Time Institute, a non-official group of scientists, said moving time zones would invariably adds stress to people's lives.

"We already had a lot of stress. The last 20 years have been without rest for Russians," he said.