Thanks for all the work you've put into updating the Russian tzdata entries. I combined your commentary and proposed changes into the attached proposed patch, which I installed into the experimental version on GitHub. In this version, only a few minor pre-1992 changes are visible to users. Although I expect that we will need new zones Europe/Kirov and Asia/Tomsk (as their post-1970 disagreements with existing zones seem to be supported well enough), for now I'm commenting out these new zones as I haven't had time to look into rumors about their pre-1990 data yet. We will need a new release soon for Azerbaijan, as 2016b is wrong starting on March 27. Chile is less urgent (May 15) but is also an issue. Magadan and Tomsk are still up in the air (their changes are not finalized by Russia yet, and so are commented out in the current experimental version).