Russians set for a life of winter as clocks change
Print Edition
RUSSIA is today set to turn back its clocks to winter time permanently in a move backed by President Vladimir Putin, reversing a 3-year experiment with non-stop summer time that proved highly unpopular.
The country will also tinker with its time zones in order to revert to the full 11 zones from Kamchatka in the Pacific to Kaliningrad on the borders of the European Union — reduced to nine by previous President Dmitry Medvedev.
In one of his highest-profile reforms, Medvedev backed Russia’s move to permanent summer time (Greenwich Mean Time plus 4 hours) in 2011 on the basis that changing clocks upset people’s biorhythms and made for “unhappy cows.”
But the change provoked a rumble of protest, with many Russians unhappy about getting up an hour earlier on pitch-dark winter mornings.
In July, Putin signed a law bringing back winter time (GMT plus 3 hours). He ruled that the clocks henceforth would never change to summer time.
The seemingly random reforms have riled Russians.
Moskovsky Komsomolets daily ran a cartoon of a man hanging himself on the hands of a clock, saying: “I’m so sick of you changing all the time.”
But health officials said the move back to winter time was harmless.
“Dark mornings have a worse effect on people’s state of health than dark evenings,” the head of sleep medicine at the Federal Medical and Biological Agency, Alexander Kalinkin, told TASS state news agency.
Time remains a highly political issue in Russia and the ex-Soviet region.
Crimea switched two hours forward to Moscow time in March, shortly after being annexed by Russia.
Neighboring Belarus followed Russia into eternal summer time in 2011 but President Lukashenko has now defiantly refused to return to winter time.
Ukraine will keep both winter and summer time.
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