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@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 El Batán Texcoco, Edo. de México CP 56130 MEXICO 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
