The Nizhny Novgorod Meridian — a catchphrase that survived from an anecdote of the Nikolaevan era. Count Pyotr Kleinmikhel, Chief Director of Transport, was touring Russia and summoned his subordinates to appear at hours set by his own St. Petersburg clock, refusing to accept the explanation that each city kept its own time; in Nizhny Novgorod he lost his temper: "It seems every wretched little town wants its own meridian?"[1][4] The phrase attached itself to the city as a jibe at provincial pretension, even though the discrepancy in clocks that sparked the quarrel was entirely real: a uniform system of time zones was not introduced in Russia until 1919.[3]
The Anecdote
The story belongs to the corpus of anecdotes from the Nikolaevan era and has been published in collections of Russian literary anecdotes.[4] Kleinmikhel's biographer Leonid Lyashenko retells it in the journal Istorik as an episode from one of the count's inspection tours of the country.[1]
Kleinmikhel, while travelling through Russia to inspect the transport routes, would appoint an hour for his subordinates to report to him in each city — naturally, the time he set was by his own watch — and he was very much taken aback when, in Moscow, the officials failed to assemble at the appointed hour. "What is the meaning of this?" cried the enraged count. He was told that Moscow clocks did not agree with St. Petersburg clocks, since Moscow and St. Petersburg have different meridians. Kleinmikhel accepted this explanation, but in Nizhny Novgorod the same thing happened, and the furious general exclaimed: "What is this? It seems every wretched little town wants its own meridian? Well, perhaps Moscow may — it is the first-throne capital — but now Nizhny has a meridian too!"
Count Kleinmikhel
Pyotr Andreyevich Kleinmikhel (1793–1869) — adjutant general, general of the infantry, count; from late 1842 until 1855 he served as Chief Director of Transport and Public Buildings.[2][1] Under his supervision the Winter Palace was restored after the fire of 1837, the first permanent bridge across the Neva and the New Hermitage building were completed, and the Nikolaevskaya Railway between St. Petersburg and Moscow was constructed.[2]
The count had promised to complete the roughly six-hundred-verst line in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Nicholas I's coronation; the imperial train arrived in Moscow on 18 August 1851, and the construction had cost 65–75 million rubles.[1] His subordinates called Kleinmikhel "the madman," and contemporaries compared him to Arakcheyev.[1] In 1855, upon the accession of Alexander II, he was dismissed from his post and transferred to the State Council.[2][1]
The Meridian Was Real
The explanation the officials offered to calm the count was correct. No uniform timekeeping existed in the country at that time: clocks were set by local noon, and the farther east a city lay, the earlier noon arrived there. Nizhny Novgorod lies east of both capitals, so its clocks were bound to differ from St. Petersburg's more than Moscow's did.
Order was established only under Soviet Power: on 8 February 1919, the Council of People's Commissars introduced timekeeping according to the international time-zone system, dividing the country into eleven zones — from the second, which included Petrograd and Moscow, through the twelfth.[3] From that moment the individual time of provincial cities ceased to exist, and with it the very premise of the anecdote disappeared.
Where the Anecdote Is Recorded
The text survives in manuscript and printed collections of anecdotes from the Nikolaevan reign, from which it passed into anthologies of the Russian literary anecdote of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[4] In the biographical essay "An Accidental Railway Man," the journal Istorik cites it as a character sketch of Kleinmikhel himself — a man for whom a superior's order outweighed the laws of nature.[1]
See Also
Sources
- istorik.rf — Istorik journal, Leonid Lyashenko — An Accidental Railway Man: a portrait of Count P. A. Kleinmikhel (archive)
- hrono.ru — Khronos — Kleinmikhel Pyotr Andreyevich (1793–1869) (archive)
- mosenergo-museum.ru — Mosenergo and Moscow Energy Museum — Russia publishes the decree "On the Introduction of Timekeeping According to the International Time-Zone System" (archive)
- facetia.ru — Facetia, corpus of the Russian literary anecdote — The Nikolaevan Era (archive)