Winter is coming: Russia turns back clocks to end summer time experiment

Russia on Sunday turns back its clocks to winter time permanently in a move backed by President Vladimir Putin, reversing a three-year experiment with non-stop summer time that proved highly unpopular. Russia 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 had backed Russia’s move to permanent Summer Time (GMT +4) 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 at getting up an hour earlier on pitch-dark winter mornings.

Dark mornings have a worse effect on people’s state of health than dark evenings.

Alexander Kalinkin, head of sleep medicine at the Federal Medical and Biological Agency

In July, Putin - known for rarely making public appearances in the morning - signed a law bringing back winter time (GMT +3). 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 man hanging himself on the hands of a clock, saying: “I’m so sick of you changing all the time.” A poll by VTsIOM state agency this month found 17 percent of Russians opposed a move to winter time, while 40 percent said they did not care and 39 percent backed the move. The Soviet Union introduced a switch to summer time in 1981. Time remains a highly political issue in Russia and the ex-Soviet region.

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