Date and time notation in Russia

Date

Present

In Russia, dates are usually written in "day month year" (DMY) order. This order is used in both the all-numeric date (for example "28.08.17") and the expanded form (for example "28 августа 2017 г.". Note: The trailing "г" is short for "год" (i.e. simply "year"). Coincidentally, in Polish the word for year is "rok", so a similar date format is used by the Poles e.g. 1987r). Single-digit numbers for day or month may have a preceding zero (for example "28.08.2017") is more usual.

When saying the date, it is usually pronounced using the ordinal number of the day first (in neutral grammatical gender), then the month in genitive case (for example "Двадцать восьмое августа").

The first day of the week in Russia is Monday.

Historical

Russia used the Byzantine calendar up to 1700, the Julian calendar between 1700 and 1918, and the Gregorian calendar since 1918. Until the final years of Peter the Great in the early 1720s, Russia used Cyrillic numerals to denote dates on coins. Thus, for example, СИ (208) denoted 7208 AM (September 1, 1699 through August 31, 1700 OS, this means that the year 7208 of the old Russian calendar, it was a short year with only four months running from September 1 to December 31) and ҂АѰ (1700) denoted AD 1700 OS (which began on January 1, after Peter's reformation, which Tsardom of Russia began numbering its calendar from the birth of Christ, instead of since the creation of the world). In 1918, the decree changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, with Wednesday, January 31 being followed by Thursday, February 14. The year 1918 was a common year so that it consisted of 352 days (365 days less 13 omitted).

Time

The 12-hour notation is often used in the spoken language. The 24-hour notation is used in writing, with a colon as the standardised and recommended separator (e.g. “9:07”). Sometimes full stop is used as a separator (e.g. 9.07), or (in handwritten text) the minutes may be written as superscript and underlined (e.g. 9⁰⁷).