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The Red Atlas
Nov. 25th, 2018 08:27 pmBook Review: The Red Atlas- How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World, by John Davies and Alexander J Kent
This was always going to be something of an odd book, I suppose. The story starts around the time of the Second World War, but Stalin's instruction to Soviet cartographers was comprehensive, the whole world to be mapped to the same standards and levels of detail. And so the bureaucracy set to work, continuing through the rest of the lifetime of the Soviet Union and beyond, with variable strength of purpose. The book includes some examples from the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, but the focus is on the mapping of the West, particularly cities in the UK and USA. It's interesting to note that the Soviets didn't trust maps such as the Ordnance Survey, because they assumed they would be as misleading as any publicly available maps in the USSR. (I like to think most people in the UK would assume, give or take obsolescence and a handful of national security redactions, Ordnance Survey maps are fairly accurate). Yet often the Soviet versions clearly did draw from foreign sources, with matching spot heights converted from feet to metres. Often they go beyond, distinguishing high- and low-rise buildings, the nature of factories and offices, additional details on roads and railways - information that must have been gathered by on-the-ground personnel (including detail on AWE Burghfield omitted from the local OS map). The book's writing style is rather academic and perhaps sterile, focusing on these details and various error cases, where aerial photographs may have been misinterpreted, but not really analysing the reasoning behind the maps or the use to which they may have been put. The accompanying website has a collection of maps available for online viewing.
This was always going to be something of an odd book, I suppose. The story starts around the time of the Second World War, but Stalin's instruction to Soviet cartographers was comprehensive, the whole world to be mapped to the same standards and levels of detail. And so the bureaucracy set to work, continuing through the rest of the lifetime of the Soviet Union and beyond, with variable strength of purpose. The book includes some examples from the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, but the focus is on the mapping of the West, particularly cities in the UK and USA. It's interesting to note that the Soviets didn't trust maps such as the Ordnance Survey, because they assumed they would be as misleading as any publicly available maps in the USSR. (I like to think most people in the UK would assume, give or take obsolescence and a handful of national security redactions, Ordnance Survey maps are fairly accurate). Yet often the Soviet versions clearly did draw from foreign sources, with matching spot heights converted from feet to metres. Often they go beyond, distinguishing high- and low-rise buildings, the nature of factories and offices, additional details on roads and railways - information that must have been gathered by on-the-ground personnel (including detail on AWE Burghfield omitted from the local OS map). The book's writing style is rather academic and perhaps sterile, focusing on these details and various error cases, where aerial photographs may have been misinterpreted, but not really analysing the reasoning behind the maps or the use to which they may have been put. The accompanying website has a collection of maps available for online viewing.