Russia will from next autumn stop putting its clocks back in winter, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday, meaning that Moscow will be four hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) all year round. "I have taken a decision to cancel the move to 'winter' time starting from autumn of the current year," Russian news agencies quoted Medvedev as telling a meeting in the Kremlin.
He explained the move by saying that the need to adapt to the time change each year was causing Russians "stress and illness". "This really disturbs the human biorhythm," said Medvedev. "It's just irritating. People either oversleep or wake up early and don't know what to do with the hour," he explained.
His decision means that Russians will be able to enjoy extra daylight in the afternoons in the long winter months when the days are uncomfortably short in most of the main cities across the country.
"We will have prolonged daylight and I think this will be healthy for our country. People have asked me for this several times." Somewhat bizarrely, he added: "And I'm not talking about unhappy cows or other animals who don't understand the time change and don't understand that the milkmaid is going to milk them at a different time."
Russia has nine time zones, stretching from Kaliningrad on the borders of the EU to Kamchatka in the Pacific.
Medvedev last year changed Kamchatka's time zone to eight hours rather than nine hours ahead of Moscow, a move that sparked street protests in the Far East region. Time is a sensitive political issue in a country of extreme climate where some zones barely see sunlight in the winter and then enjoy "white nights" when it never gets dark in the summer.