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 (1 September 1699 through 31 August 1700 (O.S.), this means that the year 7208 of the old Russian calendar, it was a short year with only four months running from 1 September to 31 December 1699 O.S.) and ҂АѰ (1700) denoted AD 1700 OS (which began on 1 January, after Peter's reformation, they were to be numbering its calendar from the birth of Christ, instead of since the creation of the world). From 1700 to 1918, the Russia had the Julian calendar, because it had been used during some parts of the Tsardom of Russia, the Russian Empire and the Russian Republic until the October Revolution on 25 October [N.S. 7 November] 1917. Wednesday, 31 January 1918 was immediately followed by Thursday, 14 February 1918, which dropped 13 days from the calendar. The year 1918 was a common year so that it consisted of 352 days (365 days less 13 omitted). This meant that the decree changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. At the time, the calendars often display the months, meaning that every place used its solar portion of the calendar based on the perceived seasonal changes synchronized to the apparent motion of the Sun, because the date was measured by locally observing the Sun's declination.

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).