The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World

John Davies · Alexander J. Kent

2017 ඔක් · University of Chicago Press

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The “utterly fascinating” untold story of Soviet Russia’s global military mapping program—featuring many of the surprising maps that resulted (Marina Lewycka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian).

From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and London to towns like Pontiac, MI, and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps.

The information on these maps ranged from the locations of factories and ports to building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by Soviet spies on the ground.

The Red Atlas includes over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.

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John Davies is editor of Sheetlines, the journal of the Charles Close Society for the Study of Ordnance Survey Maps. He lives in London. Alexander J. Kent is a reader in cartography and geographical information science at Canterbury Christ Church University and president of the British Cartographic Society.