Soviet Military Mapping: History and Research

The Soviet Union, in a closely guarded and secretive project, mapped nearly the entire world.  Split between varying scales from 1:500,000 all the way down to very detailed 1:10,000 maps of specific European and US cities, the Soviets accomplished a remarkable feat, that today, offers much to historians interested in understanding the mindset and planning of the Soviet government.  A small group of British historians, using maps found in Eastern European map shops, first began researching these maps in the late 1990s and now in a series of articles and books, describe their theories on the Soviet’s intentions.   

David Watt, a map librarian in the UK’s Ministry of Defense and of The Charles Close Soviet for the Study of Ordnance Survey Maps, described in “Soviet Military Mapping” that after the communist revolution in Russia, the new government focused primarily on mapping its own territory.  After Stalin’s death in 1953 and the rising tensions with the West, further effort went to mapping the rest of the world, with particular emphasis on Europe and the United States; ambitions to spread communism to new lands in Asia and Africa also required mapping exhibitions.   Before 1962, the Soviets received most of the information from host nation sources like the USGS maps or British Ordnance Maps, but after Sputnik and the launch of the first spy satellite Zenit, they began capturing filmographic images of landscapes throughout the world, adding greater detail to the original sheets.  Watt believes that the Soviets had upwards of 500,000 cartographers working on the project at one time, under the Military Topographic Directorate or Voyenno Topograficheskogo Upraveleniya.   They kept the maps, especially the large-scale city landscapes, at the highest levels of secrecy, limiting access to only high-ranking officers.  Due to the secrecy of the program and the remaining difficulty of extracting accurate information from the Russian Federation, the full scope of the project is still unknown.  However, Watt estimates that by the collapse of the Soviet Union, mapmakers had produced up to 1.1 million maps. 

Greg Miller, in his article “Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Map Makers,” suggests that instead of the Soviets using the maps to plan invasions or airstrikes against world targets, the mapping project served to collect information in a single source, comparable to Wikipedia or Googlemaps.  Miller further explains that while the maps produced by the Soviet military were incredibly accurate and still useful to determine boundaries today, they differed greatly in the maps produced for average citizens of the USSR.  The Soviets suppressed foreign sources of information and maps were carefully controlled and altered, becoming almost useless for the public.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation ordered army officers to destroy copies of maps, but some new capitalistically-minded entrepreneurs struck deals and sold off copies to the public.    

 Such copies found their way to Aivars Beldavs, owner of the Latvian map shop, Jana Seta, located in downtown Riga.  Beldavs maintains thousands of copies of Soviet maps, ranging in scale, and covering nearly the entire globe.  Visitors to his shop can buy specific map sheets for a few Euro.  Aside from the novelty of seeing familiar places written in Cyrillic, the maps provide an immense amount of information about the Soviet intentions and capabilities.

John Davies, a retired scholar, spent the last ten years studying both paper and digital copies of the Soviet maps acquired from Beldvas and wrote a book titled “The Red Atlas How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World.”  The details in the Soviet Maps provide clues their purposes. Davies believes that rather than intending the maps as invasion tools, they instead provide useful information for those “in charge”.  Belief in the eventual communist world takeover drove the production of the map project, hence the emphasis on schools, public transport, and factories, and less on military objectives.  Like Greg Miller, Alexander Kent, a senior lecturer of geography at Canterbury Christ Church University, thinks the maps were a “repository” of information, for use when needed, but not designed for a single purpose.

 Significant research projects using the Soviet maps, like those of John Davies, Alex Kent, and David Watt, are rare.  Access to map collections, knowledge of the Russian language, and public unawareness of the mapping program limited scholarly work.  In analyzing Soviet 1:200,000 maps of my home state, I hope to raise awareness of the Soviet Mapping program, help newcomers to the maps to navigate more easily, and contribute a small degree to a scholarly endeavor that demands further inquiry.