There were some grumblings out of Russia recently with a governor of the eastern Primorye region ( Moscow + 7 hours ) suggesting that they 'cut' this to four hours to ease communication.

If they're going to fiddle around with things like that it would be best just to decouple entirely from the Mean Sun's schedule and adopt a universal time as you suggest.

Bizarrely all official communications and timetables in the Soviet Union were published in Moscow time, across eleven time zones. That made catching a local train in Siberia quite an arithmetic challenge.