Moscow works less and sleeps more
Moscow: Russia's biggest, busiest and most over-stressed city. Right?
Well, surprisingly, perhaps not. While the anthem insists that Moscow never sleeps, the Federal Statistics Service has published figures challenging that popular claim.
A pilot study into how people use their time or have it used for them found that the capital works less and sleeps more than the national average.100 minutes for free
According to the figures, an average working day for a Russian man is 8 hours, 14 minutes, half an hour more than the average for a woman.
But in Moscow, the average man can expect to spend just 5 hours 33 minutes toiling away a saving of 101 minutes. Women average 5 hours 23 minutes.
That made the capital one of the least labor-intensive of the seven regions studied in the survey, Kommersant reported.
And it flies in the face of the widely-held belief that many Muscovites are compelled to work extra hours and often extra jobs in order make ends meet.
Time flies, traffic crawls
However, the picture is complicated by the long commutes most of us face to get to our shorter working days.
Stuck in lines of traffic, the average Russian spends about an hour getting to and from work. But in the capital the number of people commuting for two hours or more is twice the national average.
That wipes out more than half the potential extra free time on offer in Moscow, where 101 extra minutes out of the office translate into just 45 extra minutes of leisure time.
Despite this, the city that never sleeps often gets more shut-eye than its compatriots. Working men get almost half an hour's more rest than their peers in Komi Republic, for example.
Leisure time
Traditionally Moscow has been regarded as a well-read city but despite boasting the country's largest bookstore, the survey found that even with their extra time away from the office, residents read just four minutes of fiction a day.
However, it is less in thrall to the TV screen than most: men watch for 1 hour 50 minutes a day, and women for nine minutes less, while in Nizhny Novgorod 2 hours 15 minutes is the average time goggling at the box.
But that still represents the largest slice of the 3 hours 46 minutes of free time available to men in the capital, or the 3 hours 1 minute for the average woman.
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