Chimes failure

To make remote regions more manageable, Dmitry Medvedev condenses time

This year the Victory Parade will be held in Russia not as usual, but vertically integrated. It usually starts everywhere at 10 am local time. But now, by order of the president, the parade will begin in all regions at the same time, at ten in the morning Moscow time. This means that veterans in Khabarovsk and Vladivostok will have to wait until five in the evening. Why - in the order is not said.

Since last year, the fight against time has become one of President Medvedev's favorite topics. Last year, in his message to the Federal Assembly, he asked the question: does the abundance of time zones interfere with the effective management of the country? It was with this goal - to make Russia more manageable - that Vladimir Putin once divided the country into seven federal districts, and then canceled the election of governors. Dmitry Medvedev came up with his own way. Last week, he said that the reduction in the number of time zones was approved by experts, and proposed to combine the Urals with Siberia in time. He also suggested that we think about whether to abolish daylight saving time.

Moscow cannot but worry that remote regions do not feel like part of Russia. The Far East, for example, not only lives in the MSC + 7 time zone, even Russian television there is not the same as in Moscow. The fact is that in the "first orbit" federal channels show an uncensored version of talk shows and news. Television managers usually watch the broadcast together with the Far East and then make the necessary adjustments.

Two time zones have already self-destructed in Russia over the weekend. Now they are not eleven, but nine. Having caught the president's signal, the Samara region and Udmurtia moved to neighboring belts - now they live according to Moscow time. And Chukotka and Kamchatka joined the Magadan belt. The Kemerovo region has also become closer to Moscow, having joined the Omsk time zone MSK + 3.

According to Vladimir Salamatov, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade, options are being considered for reducing the current map to five time zones, and up to seven, and creating an enlarged Ural-Siberian zone, and including Kaliningrad in the Moscow zone, and switching to Yakut time (now Yakutia is divided into three time zones). As Minister of Industry and Trade Viktor Khristenko explained to Newsweek, opinions will be collected and summarized by the end of the year.

SLEEPING OFFICIALS

“At different times, different reasons for the poor controllability of the Far East were named. But until the president linked it to the time difference, no one raised this question like that!” - Vladivostok City Duma deputy Nikolai Markovtsev is getting excited. Previously, he worked as a vice-mayor and recalls cases when he was raised in the middle of the night by a call from the federal center. “At night, a light is always on somewhere in the regional administration - this is the person on duty at the turntable,” says Markovtsev. “If there is an urgent need, then any necessary person will be promptly awakened.”

This is a common practice for regions far from Moscow, according to a government official. Moreover, the duty officer is not a watchman or an employee of the FSO, but an official in a rather big position, capable of making a responsible decision - to wake up or not to wake up the governor. It happens the other way around, says a federal government official. If one of the first persons flies to the Far East or Siberia on a business trip, then at three o'clock in the morning those who remained in Moscow are pushed aside - if the authorities need documents or certificates.

Communication failures happen not only in the evening, but also in the morning, when Siberians, for example, have to wait "until Moscow opens." “It's still easy for us to wait for the opening of the capital, we have a difference of only three hours,” says an employee of the regional government apparatus of one of the regions of Western Siberia. “But Moscow calls me on my mobile at 10 pm regularly, or even later.”

Muscovites and regionals often communicate with each other on conference calls or via videoconference. Deputy Finance Minister Anton Siluanov says that according to an unwritten rule, selectors try to nominate no later than 10 am Moscow time so that all regions can participate. If the selector begins on time, then, for example, Khabarovsk residents do not have to linger at work: when it is ten in the morning in Moscow, it is five in the evening in Khabarovsk.

But the schedules of Muscovites do not always work out well for the regions. It happens that the time for a video conference is only after lunch. “It happens that someone yawns at the selector, well, once you can, everyone understands everything,” an official from Moscow taunts. Regional officials are especially worried if Vladimir Putin should participate in the meeting - he is famous for his lack of punctuality.

The time difference interferes with a bad dancer, Pavel Kudyukin, former director of the Center for Public Administration Problems, ironically. “Our state is still managed archaically, manually, by telephone,” he argues. - Everything is closed to Moscow, the regions have little decision-making powers - naturally, in this situation, the inability to get through to Anadyr is considered a problem in Moscow. There is a five-hour difference between Washington and Hawaii, but is Hawaii a difficult state to govern?

“The federal center has placed the regions under conditions of so-called competitive federalism,” says Bulat Stolyarov, director of the Institute for Regional Policy. - In the struggle for Moscow's attention, those regions that are physically closer to the capital have a significant head start. It is necessary either to decentralize the management system, or to put the regions on an equal footing in terms of time.” The choice of the president, apparently, is the second option.

PHASE SHIFT

Just as there is no consensus on the question of how many time zones should be left in Russia, so there are no exact calculations of how much this reform will cost. There is no official estimate of changes in energy consumption, and unofficial estimates vary. It is difficult to calculate it, Ivan Grachev, deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Energy, admits: “Peaks of consumption will shift, but it is impossible to predict exactly how, how much, before the start of the experiment.”

The transition of regions from one time zone to another - if we are talking about a one-hour shift - has almost no effect on energy consumption on a national scale, says Sergey Pikin, director of the Energy Development Fund. But if the jumps are more than an hour, people will have to spend more time under electric lighting, and there will be no savings. There are resources for the production of additional megawatt-hours in the Far East, Siberia and the Volga region, only you will have to overpay for the overrun. In Samara, they even calculated exactly how much: an extra three rubles a day, that is, about 100 per month on average per family.

Another victim of Medvedev's time reform will most likely be summer time. The president's main argument is people against the annual switchover. Deputy Grachev calculated the economic benefits and assures that from the transition to summer time and vice versa - only an increase in consumption.

Sergei Pikin objects: there are savings from switching to daylight saving time, however, on a national scale, it is small - about 1% of all capacities. In monetary terms, the saved megawatts are equal to 2-3 billion rubles - this is a saving not for industry, which does not work by daylight, but for people.

And Andrey Panin, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Geography of Moscow State University, calculated that summer and maternity time allow about 2,500 people to be saved from death in car accidents annually - simply due to the fact that motorists drive less in the dark. The earlier the evening comes, the more accidents, and this, according to Panin, is a proven fact. And the negative effect of moving the arrows back and forth, in his opinion, is a myth.

“Each bill to abolish daylight saving time mentions the same gigantic figure of alleged deaths due to a sharp and massive deterioration in the condition of heart patients a day or two after the switch,” says Panin. “I began to look for where these tens of thousands came from, and I did not find a single serious scientific work in the journal archives with its confirmation!”

Summer time should not be abandoned - it is necessary to abandon the return to winter time, the geographer believes: this way we will get an extra hour in the light not in the morning when we sleep, but in the evening when we are awake. If, however, not only the summer hour is eliminated, but also the maternity hour - that is, to return to life according to the sun - then in the summer, according to Panin's calculations, the sun will rise over Moscow at three in the morning, and in winter it will set at three in the afternoon. But there are few defenders of summer time as passionate as Panin, and it seems he has little chance.

TEMPORARY SEPARATISM

The transition of the Samara region to the Moscow time zone coincided with the end of school holidays. On Monday, the first day of the fourth quarter, the school in the village of Mogutovo, Orenburg Region, will probably not count the number of students. They will most likely fall asleep. The fact is that children from the neighboring village of Komsomolsky, Samara Region, go to school. Previously, they had to overcome the virtual border in one hour. Now they will jump over two at once.

If school starts at nine in the morning in Orenburg, and the fees and the road take, for example, one hour, then Samara schoolchildren will have to get up at six. And they will have to go to bed in the evening even before “Good night, kids!” goes on the air: when it will be nine o'clock in the evening in Samara, it will be already eleven in the school's time zone. There is no other school near the village of Komsomolsky, says Mikhail Matveev, deputy of the Samara Regional Duma. If time zones are enlarged, then all the boundaries of time zones will become so inconvenient, with a jump of two hours.

Matveev is the main organizer of the only regional protest so far against the transition to another time zone. Although the initiative, says Matveev, is truly popular, Nikolai Kharitonov, a simple hair dye dealer, began collecting signatures in defense of the Samara time. “They didn’t ask people! Kharitonov is indignant. - What the heck?!" In two weeks, a petition addressed to the prime minister was signed by 12,000 people.

"The majority of the population, as public opinion polls show, has a positive attitude towards the introduction of Moscow time on the territory of the Samara region," the document prepared by the regional administration says. True, most of this is not very convincing. According to the results of polls by the Samara Social Research Foundation, 33% of the region's residents were in favor of Moscow time, 30% were against it. Those who are closer to Orenburg and other neighboring regions are protesting, explains Vladimir Zvonovsky, president of the fund.

Changes in time, as well as in vocabulary and space, are a political matter, which means that 30% of those who are dissatisfied are too many to ignore. He has no doubt that the passage in time will cause popular protests. Opponents of Moscow time have already planned at least three rallies in defense of Samara time. The authorities did not agree on two of them, and the third was proposed to be moved away from the city center.

For Samara residents, their own time was a reason for pride in the region and a symbol of its independence. “And now the protege of Moscow, Artyakov, decided everything for the Samarans,” the teacher Pavel Voronkov is indignant. “He had been nurturing this waist-length idea for a long time and finally unbelted!” He also retells the city's joke - they say, the governor wanted to transfer the Samara region to Moscow time because he was tired of translating the hands of his expensive watches on frequent trips to the capital.

Deputy Matveev recalls that in the mid-90s Samara was already moving to the neighboring time zone. However, the inhabitants of the region quickly regretted the lost hour of daylight hours and sat down to write complaints to the governor. Samara time returned. Now, Voronkov believes, it is useless to complain to the governor, who is not elected, but appointed from the capital.

“Who wants to live by Moscow time, let him go to Moscow and live there!” - a resident of Samara stated decisively, commenting on the questions of a blitz survey conducted by the SuperJob.ru portal commissioned by Newsweek. 16,000 people from different cities of Russia answered questions about their attitude to the federal center. The results of the study in Samara turned out to be slightly more "separatist" than the average for Russia. “Moscow for me is a state within a state that exists separately from me and my region according to its own laws,” a 36-year-old resident of Samara is dissatisfied.

Heading the list of "separatists" are Khabarovsk, St. Petersburg, Tolyatti, Kaliningrad and Novosibirsk. “Fence Moscow with barbed wire, and let it live on its own,” a 48-year-old Khabarovsk woman urges. “Moscow doesn't give a damn about Togliatti, they're just killing VAZ,” complains a 25-year-old resident of the city. “God forbid that we are left alone with local officials!” - does not agree with her 38-year-old countryman. “Throughout Russia, deaths from tuberculosis are growing, and Moscow at this time is discussing nanotechnology, and not in the field of medicine!” - the university graduate from St. Petersburg is indignant. “I would prefer a horizontal system of power rather than a vertical one,” reflects the 48-year-old Petersburger.

The Russian authorities stubbornly refuse to define the Russian national idea, and this works for disintegration, says Igor Chubais, director of the Center for the Study of Russia at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. According to him, the troubles of the country are not at all due to the variety of belts - on the contrary, this is the uniqueness of the largest state in the world.

In Chukotka and Kamchatka, protests against the transition to neighboring time zones have not been noticed. However, in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, they are already outraged by Moscow's decision to postpone the Victory Parade to five in the evening. “Why did Moscow so defiantly spit on the regions? - the political scientist from Vladivostok Petr Khanas is perplexed. - Veterans are all very old, they will get tired by the evening. Also, the Moscow parade will not be seen on TV, and it is not clear what to do with the traditional front-line one hundred grams. However, the 90-year-old head of the Vladivostok City Committee of Veterans Yakov Kan, having learned about the president's decision, said that "the order of the commander-in-chief is not discussed."

TIME MEASURES

The zonal time system was invented by the Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming, who proposed to divide the whole world into 24 time zones of 15 degrees each, where the Greenwich meridian, the middle of the zero zone, was taken as “zero”. The difference between the zones was an hour, and the deviation from solar time should not exceed half an hour. In 1883, the United States adopted this system; in 1884, 26 countries signed an agreement on the application of the new system. The Russian Empire chose to remain in the old system of measurement - solar time, only as the development of railways at all stations introduced a single St. Petersburg time.

1917

The provisional government of Russia, following many European countries, in order to rationally use daylight hours, transfers the country to summer time. This idea first appeared, but was rejected in 1908 in England, however, during the First World War, Great Britain, Germany and Austria still switch to a new time. For the first time in Russia, daylight saving time was in effect from July 1 to December 28, 1917, but the Soviet leadership did not return to the idea of ​​seasonal clock adjustment until the 1980s.

1919

The Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR adopted a decree "On the introduction of time counting according to the international system of time zones." On July 1, 1919, Russia was divided into 11 zones: from the second to the twelfth. In 1924, standard time extended to the entire newly formed USSR. Moscow was two hours ahead of Greenwich.

1930

To redistribute electricity between domestic and industrial consumption, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR introduced maternity time: they moved the clock hands throughout the country, except for the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, one hour ahead of standard time. Although this decision was supposed to be temporary, they did not cancel it, and the country began to live according to the standard time, and the difference between Moscow and Greenwich was now three hours.

1957

By the decision of the Interdepartmental Commission of the Unified Time Service under the Committee of Standards, Measures and Measuring Instruments under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, new time zone boundaries were established. If earlier they passed along the meridians, now the administrative division of the country was taken as the basis so that the edges and regions were not divided into time zones.

1981

By a decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, an annual transition to summer and winter time was introduced in the country. Since maternity time continued to operate in the Union, summer time began to be ahead of standard time by two hours, that is, the difference between Moscow and Greenwich in the summer was four hours.

1982

In 1982, by a decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, maternity time was abolished in 27 regions and autonomous republics and districts on the territory of the RSFSR. Thanks to this, almost the entire “third zone” (Central Russia, southern Russia and the North Caucasus, the Upper Volga region, as well as the Arkhangelsk region and Komi) began to live according to Moscow time, and Taimyr, Khatanga and Evenkia - according to Krasnoyarsk time.

1988–1989

The Council of Ministers of the USSR also returns to standard time the Kaliningrad region and the Baltic republics (now there is an hour less time than in Moscow), the Ural region of Kazakhstan (an hour more than in Moscow), as well as the Lower Volga region and the Kirov region (they began to live according to Moscow time).

1990 - spring 1991

By decision of the local authorities, maternity time was canceled in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, and from March 31, 1991 - throughout the Soviet Union.

Autumn 1991

The Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR decided to return Russia to maternity time, albeit with exceptions. De facto, Kaliningrad, the entire “third time zone” (with the exception of Udmurtia and the Saratov region), as well as the Arkhangelsk and Tyumen regions and the Komi Republic remained on standard time. Moscow still lives on maternity time (the difference with Greenwich is three hours in winter, four hours in summer).