President Dmitry Medvedev suggested Thursday reducing the number of time zones that slice up the world's largest country. That could shorten the seven-hour time difference between Moscow and Vladivostok _ a two-week train journey to the east _ to just a few hours.

"The examples of other countries _ the U.S., China _ show that it is possible to cope with a smaller time difference," Medvedev said in his annual state-of-the-nation speech. "We need to examine the possibility of reducing the number of time zones."

Medvedev stressed that it is necessary first to assess the advantages of such a move. Russia's vastness is a source of national pride, but it also hinders economic development, Medvedev said. "Here it is necessary to compare all the economic benefits (with the) obvious discomforts," he said.

Russia has 11 times zones and represents one-ninth of the world's land mass, stretching from the Western exclave of Kaliningrad, where the time is 2 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, to the eastern tip of Chukotka _ across the Bering Strait from Alaska _ where it is GMT+12.

Medvedev didn't say how extensive any cut would be, but Vladivostok Economics University rector Gennady Lazarev told the RIA Novosti news agency it would likely mean reducing Russia to just four time zones: One each for Kaliningrad, Moscow, the Ural Mountains region and the vast reaches of Siberia and the Far East.

Less than a quarter of Russia's 142 million people live east of the Urals _ the boundary between Europe and Asia _ in areas that constitute two-thirds of Russia's land.

"I can't fathom it," Lilia Shevtsova, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said of the proposal. "It is potentially life-changing for some people, for the sake of convenience in Moscow."

Its supporters claim cutting time zones could help bring the nation's distant east closer and stoke feelings of loyalty toward the central government in Moscow. But experience in other countries warns of the opposite effect _ a potentially divisive feeling of separation.

China, before the 1949 communist revolution, recognized five time zones. But under Mao Zedong's government _ with its obsession with strong central leadership and unified national political movements _ they were all abolished in favor of Beijing standard time.

The major impact in China has been to require government offices in far western cities such as Kashgar, which lies at the same longitude as New Delhi, to open at the break of dawn. Some residents have responded with defiance, setting their clocks 3 1/2 hours behind Beijing in violation of official policy.

Arkady Tishkov, a doctor of geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Ekho Moskvy radio that playing with clocks is unacceptable if the economic benefit is outweighed by health problems associated with out-of-synch life styles.

Lazarev, also a city lawmaker in Vladivostok _ about 9,300 kilometers (5,750 miles) east of Moscow, just a few miles from China's easternmost border _ suggested implementing a time switch gradually by jumping forward to daylight savings time in some areas every year, then not setting the clocks back in the fall.

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Associated Press Writer Christopher Bodeen contributed from Beijing.