The Communist calendar also known as the Soviet calendar or the Salnikov or Polyanin calendar, was a calendar system devised in the early 20th century in Communist Russia and thereafter proliferated across Europe and around the world at various times. Today, it is only in use in a handful of scattered communist states, who have largely altered it to be in line with the Gregorian calendar used in most of the world. Prior to the Russian Revolution, the Russian Empire still utilized the Julian calendar, which had been supplanted in the rest of Europe. After the Revolution, Soviet leader V. I. Lenin ordered a transition to the Gregorian system over the course of 1918. However, the use of the standard Gregorian calendar was short-lived, as Lenin's various successors began altering the calendar for political and economic purposes.
In the period after Lenin's assassination, there was a tendency to remove anything that resembled the "old ways" including the nature of the work week and the calendar itself. Factional disputes over workers should have a five-day work week or six-day work week was subsumed into a greater debate about religion and the desire to reduce the importance of Sunday as the day off. As such, the day off was usually Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Another key change was the abolition of the old names for the days of the week and the months, instead being referred to simply by their numbers, i.e. the 2nd day of the 7th month, the 11th day of the 3rd month. Another major argument was over the placement and selection of holidays. Two holidays had consensus status, New Years Day (the former 1 January), and Workers Day/May Day (the former 1 May). Other dates were inserted and removed for political expediency and depending on production needs. Among these were Bloody Sunday, Lenin's Martyrdom, Day of the Paris Commune, and Marx's Birthday.
The biggest shift in the calendar system came under Salnikov, who announced a complete change to a "perfect calendar", with the 365 days of the year reformatted into 13 months of 28 days, organized in 4 seven day weeks, and a solitary additional day which was not counted as one of the 7 days of the week or included in any of the months, to be celebrated as the national holiday. In the seven day week, the 7th day would be the day off for all workers, and the second day off would be the 3rd day of the week, with workers divided into halves which would alternate every other 3rd day as their day off. The months were renamed after revolutionary and communist heroes and days were renamed after heroic qualities of the workers. This system proved rather difficult for workers and state officials alike to adapt to. Consequently, most people continued covertly using the Gregorian calendar to maintain internal timekeeping, depsite Salnikov's prohibition of that system and the secret police being authorized to suppress it.
Salnikov's "perfect calendar" was interrupted by the Continental War, which necessitated greater levels of production. The alternating day off on the 3rd day of the weeks was suspended and all workers were on a six-day work week. However, to alleviate discontent, more holidays were added at random dates whenever it was felt that a brief gap in production could be accommodated. As Soviet troops crossed the continent establishing more communist regimes, Salnikov attempted to enforce his calendar system on them to varying degrees of success. At the end of the war, most of Europe was under communist regimes, and all of them at least nominally agreed to utilize his calendar. However, one oversight during the war had been the intercalary leap days utilized in the Gregorian calendar to keep the calendar aligned with the solar year. Having missed two leap days during the war, and skipping the one immediately preceding it in order to increase productivity, Salnikov decided to add the three days onto the next National Day along with another three days for a week of continent-wide celebration of Communist victory, borrowing the days from the next three leap days, which could now be skipped.
For the next five years, the Salnikov calendar remained stationary and its usage became more commonplace, particularly in Russia where people had adapted to it well enough to no longer need to consult the Gregorian calendar as a reference. However, the system broke down with his death. His immediate successor, Goncharov, inserted a national holiday into the calendar for Salnikov's funeral, which he viewed as necessary in order to maintain consistent production in the week after the holiday. This interruption caused other members of the International to be out of sync with Russia, as not every nation followed suit. Most of them simply made it a regular day off, substituting the day of the funeral for that week's 7th day. To remedy this, Goncharov announced that all years would now have 366 days, with the anniversary of Salnikov's death as a permament holiday like Workers Day, and ordered the International to follow suit. This was achieved over the course of the next two years amid considerable hand wringing and arm twisting.
Goncharov had thus completely destroyed Salnikov's perfect calendar, forcing the calendar out of alignment with the solar year and Gregorian calendar, and opening the door for further political manipulation of the calendar. Goncharov's death prompted his successor, Polyanin, to give him the same treatment as Salnikov and add a holiday to the calendar. This was vehemently ignored by the rest of the International, thus creating a problem where the Russians were on a 367 day year while others were on 366 or even reverting to 365. Polyanin, who was becoming obsessed with the emerging computing industry and its potential for economic planning, convened a symposium of engineers, economists, and mathematicians to develop an improved calendar. The system which they developed was based on an 8 day work week, consisting of 3 days of work followed by 1 day off, repeating. The 3-1 system was believed to maximize worker productivity. An 8 day week necessitated a year of 360 days, 368 days, or some other variation in between those consisting of holidays. Polyanin decided as the year had already been made to include 367 days, adding one more to make 368 would be the most efficient. This would enable the year to be divided into 2 equal halves of 23 weeks. In each half of the year, 4 days would be assigned to holidays.
Polyanin's calendar was viewed a complete absurdity by most of the International, who had by then reverted to the base Salnikov calendar, or completely back to the Gregorian calendar. His inability to effect his plan outside Russia was a portent of decreasing Russian influence in the International, as well as his personal abrasiveness and lack of tact. Nevertheless, his plan went into effect in the Russian sphere despite grumbling from Russian workers and bureaucrats. Polyanin's calendar outlasted him, as he was overthrown in a palace coup less than three years into his system. Under Dragomirovna, the Polyanin calendar was not abolished, to the consternation of her supporters. She could not deny that economic efficiency had actually increased in the new system and looked to continue. Furthermore, workers appreciated the 3-1 system, even if they had difficulty keeping track of time in the long run. Thus the Polyanin calendar last for nearly a decade.
However, the revolving door of leaders who replaced Dragomirovna did not show it the same respect and began instituting alterations which would bring the whole system down. Due to the series of coups, assassinations, and elections that precipitated the changes in the Kremlin, it became a common practice to institute a national holiday to gain favor with the populace. Some leaders wisely made a working day into a double day off, while other added a whole day to the calendar, much to the consternation of the programmers, who had to race to tack on additional days to their mathematically-defined years. Between 1967 and 1974, five such days had been haphazardly appended to the year. Vishnevsky's plan to withdraw the extra holidays met popular backlash, so to restore the balance in the calendar, 1975 was give a further three extra days, which were put together with the five bonus days and packaged together in one full eight day holiday week in the middle of the year.
By this point, timekeeping had become so disorganized that different computers in the same building would be displaying different dates. Another problem was that Soviet year was greatly out of the sync with the rest of the world, and indeed nature itself. The Russian year 1975, which had 376 days, ended 48 days after the Gregorian year. Vishnevsky announced that 1 day would be subtracted from the bonus week every year for the next eight years, in order to restore the Polyanin system. This was never achieved due to Vishnevsky's assassination, and Yablonovskya putting back that year's planned subtraction as a day to honor him. In subsequent years, the economic downturn forced increased production to meet planned annual targets, and days of the bonus week were reassigned working days. This was tolerated for a short time, but the announcement that some regular days off would be converted to working days caused mass dissent. To placate the workers, Yablonovskya agreed that each day reassigned to work would be added back as an additional holiday in the next surplus year. This was not achieved until 1983.
Between the death of Goncharov and the arrival of the long-anticipated bonus year of 1984, Soviet programmers had come to anticipate the caprices of their leaders and planners and had successfully built a robust system that could accommodate their abuses of the calendar, with centralized control to input top-down changes. However, all agreed that the 44 retroactive days which had been missed in the economic downturn could not be added back at once. As a compromise, the programmers, workers, and the Presidium agreed to implement two 400 day years in 1985 and 1986 before going back to the original Polyanin system. In the 400 day years, 24 holiday days would be added at a rate of 1 per week in the first 12 weeks and last 12 weeks of the year. A national program to distribute accurate computers to every part of the country and make sure all computers were aligned to the central system was undertaken.
By this point, the Soviet calendar had little connection to science or indeed, the rest of the world. Consequently, the Gregorian calendar had been widely adopted once again and dual usage was common across the country. The official Soviet calendar was utilized for work purposes, but the Gregorian calendar was used for international relations and commerce, annual-based contracts and plans, as well as the covert observation of religious events and the burgeoning Soviet space program. Most prominently, the Gregorian calendar was used to keep track of people's ages and birthdays, a necessity since the first 368 day year. With the Gregorian calendar in their back pocket, most people were willing to accept the wildly varying communist calendar as simply a national work and holiday schedule. This would turn out to be fortuitous, as the chaos was not yet over.
Near the end of 1985, the economist reported to Yablonovskaya that the 400 day year had been a resounding success, with productivity soaring in any timeframe, whether the 365 day year, the 368 day year, the 376 day year, and the 400 day year. The bonus days were perfectly placed to maximize efficiency. It was argued that a continuation of this program would result in continued growth far apace of a reversion to the Polyanin system. The Chairwoman was attentive but apprehensive, cognizant of the danger of upsetting the workers yet again. She deferred the decision to 1986, waiting to see if the results would be the same. When they were, she committed to a 400 day redesigned year of 12 33 day months and 4 bonus days. The announcement was met with widespread disapproval and culminated in a general strike to remove Yablonovskaya from office. It was the first government change in Soviet history caused directly by its eccentric calendar system. Her successor, Zakharenko, was brought into office explicitly on the basis of normalizing the calendar.
Zakharenko, a programmer and economist by trade, was one of the few such officers who had opposed the new scheme. Privately, he believed a reversion to the Gregorian calendar might be best for Russia, but also knew that such a disruption would be firmly opposed by the hardliners. After examining all the data and assessing the national mood, he conceded to the argument that a drastic change would be greatly damaging to the economy. After allowing 1987 to proceed under the planned 376 day scheme, he announced that 1988 would be restructured to settle the calendar dispute once and for all. In order to achieve his three main goals, that being the satisfaction of the rights of the workers, the continued prosperity of the economy, and realignment of the Soviet system with the rest of the world, Zakharenko announced that he was extending the year 1988 to have 502 days, to be followed immediately by the year 1990, which be a return to 365 days in a Salnikovesque system. This was done to accomodate for the 228 day lag behind the Gregorian year which had developed over the preceding decades. The Soviet year 1988 would thus conclude on Gregorian 31 December 1989.
Reaction to this news was mixed. The return of the 365 day year was celebrated, but the length of the coming year and the elimination of 1989 led to confusion and dismay, mollified in part by the inclusion of numerous holidays and bonus days. The overwhelming consensus was that a return to a more sensible system should be the utmost priority. Thus, Zakharenko's 502 day year went on, surpassing Julius Caesar's 445 day 46 BC, and 1 January 1990 saw Russia brought back in line with the world for the first time in over 50 years. Zakharenko surprised the nation by resigning from office on the first day of the new system, with his new system left in the hands of the powerful Bureau of State Timekeeping and more importantly the unalterable Central Computer of the Federation.
The Zakharenko system had 365 days, 366 in leap years, in which the year was organized into 11 months of 33 days, which each consisted of 4 8 day work weeks of the 3-1 system, plus one bonus day. Two national holidays were outside any month. This system was widely hailed as a triumph of central planning and logic, and remains in place to this day. For this, Zakharenko is regarded as a hero and one of the great leaders in national history. Since 2011, Zakharenko has served as Minister of the Timekeeping Bureau under the governments of five Chairmen.o Monthly bonus days are called Zakharenko days. Coincidentally, Zakharenko's given name is Grigoriy, and he implemented his reforms during the reign of Pope Gregory XVIII, so his system is also sometimes called the Grigorian calendar, although this is mostly said as a joke.
Today, any country which does not use the Gregorian calendar, with its 12 months and 7 day weeks, usually utilized either the original Salnikov system or some alteration of the Zakharenko system. The Gregorian calendar remains the international standard. In Russia itself, the history of the calendar system is used in many common sayings. A "Zakharenko year" refers to an inordinately long time, while a "Yablonovskya" refers to doing something longer than is preferred. 1989 is used to refer to fictitious times, comparable to "when pigs fly" in English. Many youths say they were born in 1989 when pretending to be adults to acquire alcohol or other restricted products. Any politician who attempts to alter the calendar is dubbed a Goncharov or a Vishnevsky, and Polyaninism means undue adherence to the computer based planned economy.
