Russia recently moved to permanent Standard Time – also known as “winter time”. But some expatriates living in, or moving to, Russia, may not know the reason why most Russians set their clocks back one hour.
Perhaps you will think that changing the hour in Europe is a common thing in order to save electricity but in the case of Russia this year it means a little bit more.
For the past three years, Russia has experimented with keeping permanent summer time, but it proved to be very unpopular with many Russians – forcing many of them to travel to work in the dark, due to during the winter the sun won’t raise until 10 a.m.
Moscow and other parts of European Russia have now started using UTC+3 (Coordinated Universal Time) again. This change has reduced the time difference between Moscow and a number of other countries in Western Europe. It has also increased Russia’s time zones, from the nine established by President Medvedev, to 11.
From now on, Russia will remain on Standard Time and will not be joining the rest of Europe in setting their clocks forward in March 2015.
The information featured in this article was provided by the BBC and The Guardian.
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