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The Soviet Union Put Its Clocks Forward for the Summer and Forgot to Put Them Back for 61 Years

On 16 June 1930, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree. At midnight on 21 June, every clock in the Soviet Union — across all eleven time zones — went forward by one hour. Moscow moved from UTC+2 to UTC+3. The official justification was energy conservation.

It was called dekretnoye vremya: Decree Time.

Here is the part that only became public in 1991. According to the Moscow newspaper Evening Moscow, the 1930 change had been introduced as summer time. The clocks were supposed to go back in the autumn.

Nobody announced winter time in the autumn of 1930. And for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained, summer time was not reintroduced in the spring of 1931 either — which left the entire Soviet Union permanently one hour ahead of where it had meant to be.

The country stayed that way for sixty-one years.

In March 1991, Soviet officials publicly conceded that the USSR had not been keeping the correct time since the Stalin era, and moved to fix it. A Moscow newspaper ran the headline, roughly: are we going to move our hands?

It got stranger before it got simpler. When the USSR introduced actual daylight saving time in 1981, it was applied on top of Decree Time — so Soviet summers ran two full hours ahead of standard time. Russia then abolished Decree Time in 1991, reinstated it in 1992, adopted year-round daylight saving in 2011, and in 2014 turned the clocks back once more to permanent standard time, where they remain.

The clock: Russia spans eleven time zones, more than any other country. Moscow is one of them, and for most of the last century it was effectively all of them: Soviet and Russian railway timetables were published in Moscow time across the entire network, so a passenger boarding in the far east read a departure time that had nothing to do with the sun outside the window.

The 1919 decree that created those eleven zones did one other thing worth noting. It introduced the 24-hour clock to Russia — which is why, more than a century later, Russian train tickets still say 16:00 and not 4pm.

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