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A while ago, maybe the 80s, I remember reading something like a magazine article about a reporter visiting the Soviet Union for some human interest story or sim
by tacon 9y ago
A while ago, maybe the 80s, I remember reading something like a magazine article about a reporter visiting the Soviet Union for some human interest story or similar. Soviet cities were notorious for not having useful maps available. Somehow the reporter knew a US military attache and he said not to worry, he'd bring along his own maps and everything was easy. It made sense to me at the time, but now I wonder how available such US military maps were to visiting friends. Maybe the US version of the consumer city map was so non-strategic that they were easily available.
- fapjacks 9y agoI bought the book associated with this post (absolutely beautiful and well-made book), and in it they mention that only civilian maps made available to Soviet citizens were purposefully nerfed, but that many Western civilian maps of Soviet cities borrowed data from easily-available Western military maps, so that if you were to somehow buy a map of Moscow at some civilian gas station in Rome (this is my own example to paraphrase), it would have been fairly accurate, and loads more accurate than the maps available to civilians in the Soviet Union.
- flavio81 9y ago>Soviet cities were notorious for not having useful maps available. This article expands on this topic. Surprising! http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-maps-were-faked-for-50-years.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-m...