Russia adopts the Gregorian calendar

On 14 February 1918 Soviet Russia began counting its days as almost all of Europe did. The day before, a Wednesday, calendars in Petrograd and Moscow had shown 31 January. The next day, a Thursday, was however not 1 February but 14 February. This was required by the decree “on the introduction of the Western European calendar in the Russian Republic”, which the Council of People’s Commissars had adopted on 24 January (6 February) 1918 and which Pravda published the following day. The decree was signed by the head of the government, Vladimir Lenin, the deputy commissar for foreign affairs Georgy Chicherin and four people’s commissars. Some sources give the date of signature as 26 January (8 February). February 1918 thus lasted only 15 days in Russia.

The Russian Empire had clung to the Julian calendar to the end. Since 1900 it had lagged 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII and gradually adopted by the rest of Europe. The main obstacle was the Orthodox Church, the state religion of the empire, which refused to accept a “Latin” reform. International documents, part of the press and also official papers from the Polish lands, where the Catholic population lived by the Gregorian calendar, gave both dates. That is why the revolution of 8–12 March 1917 is called the February Revolution, and the Bolshevik coup of 7 November the October Revolution.

The Bolsheviks had raised the question of the calendar as early as November 1917. The decree justified the change by the need “to establish in Russia the same reckoning of time as almost all cultured nations”. The way had been opened by the decree on the separation of the Church from the state and of the school from the Church, announced on 23 January (5 February): the civil calendar no longer had to be tied to the Church one. According to Russian accounts, two drafts were considered at a government meeting on the same day. The first provided for a gradual transition, by dropping one day a year for 13 years, which would have allowed the Church to join in. The second, supported by Lenin, envisaged a single change, and it prevailed.

The decree also regulated the practical effects of the change. Deadlines for obligations that would have fallen between 1 and 14 February were moved by 13 days. Employees paid at the end of the month were to receive on 28 February a salary reduced by 13/30. Those paid on the 15th and 30th of the month received no money on 15 February; their whole monthly salary, likewise reduced by 13/30, was paid to them on 28 February. Until 1 July 1918 every new-style date was to be followed in brackets by the date according to the old calendar. Hence the terms “Old Style” and “New Style”, established in Russian historiography.

The Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Tikhon did not follow the state and stayed with the Julian calendar. In 1923 the patriarch did introduce the Revised Julian calendar in the Church, but after protests from the faithful he shelved the reform after only 24 days. To this day the Russian Church celebrates Christmas on 7 January. The decree, moreover, applied only where Bolshevik power reached. The Ukrainian People’s Republic switched to the new calendar at the beginning of March 1918, and the White authorities in southern Russia kept to the Old Style until the end of the Civil War. Of Russia’s allies, Romania changed its calendar only in 1919 and Greece in 1923, whereas Bulgaria, fighting on the other side, had already done so in 1916.

On this site we give dates according to the Gregorian calendar. For Russian events up to this day we have added the Julian date in brackets, because that is how contemporary documents and memoirs recorded them. From 14 February 1918 dates from Soviet Russia no longer need this treatment, but for Romania and the Russian Whites the 13-day difference must still be borne in mind.