Thanks for considering the case! For what it's worth, you might check out this reference, which is the closest to an authoritative reference (apart from wikipedia) that I could find. Wikipedia has a page about the Kirov Oblast' : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirov_Oblast this one has a direct link to the official Kirov Oblast web page in russian: http://www.gov-vyatka.ru/ this web site doesn't seem to have a direct mentioning of the GMT offset, althought I admit my 3 years college russian is not very able any more, but there is a direct link to the Kirov page of www.gismeteo.ru which is http://www.gismeteo.ru/weather/towns/27196.htm again here I could not find the GMT offset directly, but the page has an astronomic frame at the left side with a little moon, where the sunrise and sunset times are 4:21 and 20:53. This corresponds to GMT+4, which means GMT+3 with DST right now. In World Time Explorer I have Kirov on GMT+4 (+ 1 hour DST) at the moment, and showing sunrise and sunset as 5:18 and 21:57. I assume here that the Kirov Oblast would not put a direct link to a page showing the wrong time for it, not even within sunrise or sunset. But for Russia, we lack authoritative information both regarding current GMT offsets and timezone history. It must be there somewhere (in Russia), but it's really hard to excavate with only internet tools and a limited russian vocabulary. Regards - Jesper -----Original Message----- From: Paul Eggert [mailto:eggert@cs.ucla.edu] Sent: Tuesday, May 9, 2006 04:40 To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: Re: Russia +4 breakout oblasts Jesper Norgaard Welen <jnorgard@prodigy.net.mx> writes:
The following maps show the oblast' Kirovskaya, Saratovskaya, Volgogradskaya and Astrakhanskaya to be on GMT+4 ... 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.
Thanks for the heads-up. Shanks & Pottenger (2003) say Kirov is still at +0400, which sounds incorrect to me; and that Saratov, Volgograd, and Astrakhan switched to +0300 on 1992-03-29 02:00. Of all these, Volgograd has the largest population, so I suppose it should get a tz entry. I'll need to review Shanks & Pottenger, and Shanks's earlier editions, to see how this error crept into the tz database. Also, I'm puzzled by the disagreement about Kirov. Here's a draft entry for Volgograd, given what I know now. # # Astrakhanskaya oblast', Kirovskaya oblast', Saratovskaya oblast', # Volgogradskaya oblast'. Shanks & Pottenger say Kirov is still at +0400 # but Wikipedia (2006-05-09) says +0300. Perhaps it switched after the # others? But we have no data. Zone Europe/Volgograd 2:57:40 - LMT 1920 Jan 3 3:00 - TSAT 1925 Apr 6 # Tsaritsyn Time 3:00 - STAT 1930 Jun 21 # Stalingrad Time 4:00 - STAT 1961 Nov 11 4:00 Russia VOL%sT 1989 Mar 26 2:00s # Volgograd T 3:00 Russia VOL%sT 1991 Mar 31 2:00s 4:00 - VOLT 1992 Mar 29 2:00s 3:00 Russia VOL%sT