Russian cities

[Gwillim Law]

I've been creating a set of Web pages (see
<http://www.mindspring.com/~gwil/tz.html>) with time zone data, mostly from
the tz database, but doing considerable additional research.  In the case of
Russia, looking at time zone maps, I concluded that each oblast' lies
entirely within one time zone, except Sakha and possibly Chukot.  (Of
course, that might have been an unsupported premise of the mapmakers.)  I
tabulated the time zone for each oblast' according to various sources.  Here
are the results I got for the five oblasti of current concern.  Numbers are
hour offsets from UTC.  (If you use a monospacing font the columns should
align.)

Division  |T|Ab|wtz|ent|MI|NO|WF|PCL|WF|RM|IAT|Qd|GU|tz
Astrakhan'|o|AS|3  |4  |4 |3 |5 |4  |4 |4 |3  |  |4 |
Samara    |o|SA|4  |4  |4 |4 |4 |4  |4 |4 |4  |  |4 |4
Saratov   |o|SR|3  |4  |3 |3 |5 |4  |4 |4 |   |  |4 |
Ul'yanovsk|o|UL|4  |4  |4 |4 |5 |4  |4 |4 |   |  |4 |
Volgograd |o|VG|3  |4  |3 |3 |5 |4  |4 |4 |   |4 |4 |

wtz:  http://www.worldtimezone.com/time-russia2.htm (2001)
ent:  Rives McDow enteles map (2000-02)
MI:  http://www.mark-itt.ru/Collection/Russia/tz_rus.html (2001)
NO:  U.S. Naval Observatory map
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/world_tzones.html (2001-04)
WF:
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/reference/Low%20res%20PDF/low8
02700.pdf (2000-04)
PCL:  http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/commonwealth/ussr_time_82.jpg (1982-03)
WF:  Map in printed CIA World Factbook (1992)
RM:  Map in the Rand McNally International Atlas (1990)
IAT:  IATA SSIM data (1991-02 to 2000-02, inclusive)
Qd:  Quid (a French encyclopedic almanac) (1993)
GU:  Hildebrands map of GUS (CIS) (1994)
tz:  tz database 2001b (2001)

It looks as if some oblasti moved from one time zone to another a couple of
years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and that might account for
some of the discrepancies in the table above.

Gwillim Law