Russia +4 breakout oblasts

[Jesper Norgaard Welen]

Oscar van Vlijmen made (as far as I understand) a thourough investigation of
the Russian timezones in 2001-08-25 which documented all the oblasts that
the russian timezones covers, listing the oblast's that correspond to each
timezone. There are many english-speaking sites that to this day disagree
with specific cities (stating that Kirov is on GMT+4 and similar), but after
checking some russian sites I have come to the conclusion that the highly
appreciated work of Oscar is still corresponding to current time in those
places.

However, all of the russian timezones in the tz database are declared as
having been unaltered since 1991-1993 (this differs a bit from one russian
timezone to the other), and especially the Europe/Samara timezone is
unchanged since 1991 Oct 20 3:00. The following maps show the oblast'
Kirovskaya, Saratovskaya, Volgogradskaya and Astrakhanskaya to be on GMT+4
as well:
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/reference_maps/pdf/time_zones.
pdf
http://www.statoids.com/tru.html
http://www.manifold.net/download/freemaps.html
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/world_maps/time_zone_world_98.jpg
This is also true for a recent (1995+) ESRI map of timezones I have seen.
The above links are all taken directly or indirectly from
http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm

Oscar is correct that since 2001 these were no longer on GMT+4 but had
returned to GMT+3, but this return we have not documented with one or
several timezones. I am not aware when these changes happened, but any guess
would be better than the current state, where these four oblast' are on
Moscow time since 1880, which is hardly likely to be true, if so many map
makers have insisted on that they were on GMT+4 or even GMT+5.

Regards,
- Jesper

Jesper Nørgaard Welen
Email: jnorgard at Prodigy.Net.mx	
Project Leader (Líder de Proyecto) Software
CIMMYT  -  Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo
Dirección: CIMMYT Int. c/o Jesper Nørgaard
Km. 45, Carretera México-Veracruz
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Tel.:	+52 (55) 58-04-20-04  ext. 1374
Fax:	+52 (55) 58-04-75-58
Tel. Casa:   53-10-05-95  ó  53-10-97-78
Download the free program World Time Explorer, I made:
http://www.worldtimeexplorer.com/index.html
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