15 ms·

Soviet Military Maps of North America and UK

192 points by dayofthedaleks 5y ago

ggm 5y ago
And the rest of the world.
- dayofthedaleks 5y ago
  Whoops! How Atlanticist of me.
mNovak 5y ago
I posted the same in the other thread, but since we're here -- here is my 1:500k map of south/central Ohio. You can see Columbus and Dayton at the top. https://imgur.com/a/wlN5aAe https://imgur.com/a/wlN5aAe (right-click, open in new tab to really zoom in)
akoster 5y ago
Wired had a interesting piece on this back in 2015: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/ And with some spooky details on San Diego, California (and many other places): https://www.wired.com/2015/07/soviet-militarys-eerily-detailed-guide-san-diego/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/soviet-militarys-eerily-detail...
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I checked the area where I grew up. There's a minor but quite obvious mistake. Interesting to see the place names phoneticised to Cyrillic. Not sure how useful that would have been in an invasion.
- nradov 5y ago
  They weren't seriously planning a land invasion. Air and missile strikes only.
- p_l 5y ago
  Some of it was to make it easier to talk for people who didn't know the language of the country on the map, I heard that polish military maps of the UK apparently were "localized" the same way - and the persistent rumour is that under "take all of europe in counterstrike to prevent USA supplying the invasion" plan, Polish forces were to occupy major portions of UK.
- aerostable_slug 5y ago
  Imagine trying to figure out how to correctly say "Port Hueneme" if you're a random Soviet officer. Probably best they were phoneticized if only so other Soviets would have some idea of what you were talking about. Also, I think we can feel somewhat confident that over the years the Soviets intended for special operations to take place on American soil. Few non-nuclear things screw with preparations for a deployment overseas more than transmission power lines for San Diego and/or Norfolk dropping, or an outbreak of a crop disease, or what have you. If you're feeling sporty, assassinate a few people (preferably false flag ops to stoke domestic divisions).
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Would have been horrible when it came to converting Welsh: https://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/ https://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysil...
portlander52232 5y ago
Man, it’s creepy to find your house on a Soviet map.
wolverine876 5y ago
Interesting selection of cities: https://redatlasbook.com/cityplansus https://redatlasbook.com/cityplansus No Detroit (probably in the top 5-7 in population then, and a major manufacturing center), Houston, Philadelphia, New Orleans (control access to the Mississippi River) ... but they do have Worcester, MA. Edit: Possibly that list is a subset of the Soviet maps selected by the publisher.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  Vancouver, Montréal and Halifax but no Ottawa, Toronto or Deep/Chalk River. Bizarre! The only connection I can make is that Vancouver, Montréal and Halifax are navigable by ocean going ships and the others are not?
  - zelienople 5y ago
    I spent my childhood worrying about a nuclear attack on my city and now I find out that we didn't even make it to the map? I am disappoint.
    - scotty79 5y ago
      My city in eastern Europe was close to a nuclear target. So much for USA liberating us from Russian influence. I guess we can't be under communist regime if we are dead.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        > My city in eastern Europe was close to a nuclear target. So much for USA liberating us from Russian influence. How are those two sentences related?
        scotty79 5y ago
        Imagine being a hostage and finding out that snipers were intending to shoot the criminal through you.
the_af 5y ago
> "The maps are still a taboo topic in Russia today, so it’s impossible to know for sure, but what they’re finding suggests that the Soviet military maps were far more than an invasion plan. Rather, they were a framework for organizing much of what the Soviets knew about the world, almost like a mashup of Google Maps and Wikipedia" This doesn't surprise me and it shouldn't anyone else either. It's obvious these weren't meant for invasion or occupation of North America, which were never part of Soviet planning or policy. A nuclear exchange with the US? Maybe. War in Europe? Sure. But invasion of North America? No, why would they? It would be costly and likely to end in defeat, and for what end goal? Most Soviet war plans that we know of where either defensive in nature (arguably; preemptive strikes or even reactive after an attack), reacting to perceived threats to their satellite countries or assets, or corrective actions against their allies when they were perceived to get out of line with the Kremlin. None of these fit invading North America, however cinematic that notion might be.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  I would have thought it was unlikely that an apparatus as large as the Soviet Union would never have drawn up plans for a contingency in which politics forced them to consider an invasion of their rival superpower. Not that they would intend to use them, but to have gone to the trouble of mapping the military targets at such a scale, then never spending time to have someone think about how they'd occupy those sites if they had to, seems so foreign to how I expect military brains to work, that I have trouble believing it's true. A brief Google search doesn't show any (credible) plans, so maybe you're right: but, absence of evidence, especially in a secretive bureaucracy that actively expunged so much of its archives, is not necessarily evidence of absence!
  - p_l 5y ago
    Reality is probably more unrealistic than people think, and funnier to boot. People who were at least slightly aware of military planning in Poland but not necessarily with the "why" of the plan (this included pretty big portion of citizenry, due to conscription) tend to think Warsaw Pact's claims about defensive warfare were just lies. Meanwhile the defensive warfare concept was to counterattack once the "inevitable NATO strike against communism" happens, to as quickly as possible take logistic routes that America could use to wage war in Europe. Atlantic is pretty big issue for any invasion not just towards America, after all. Then you hit the next layer of hilarious misunderstandings (YMMV) which is western planners somehow not getting the memo that Soviet decision makers in Moscow actually believed in NATO first strike (honestly, I don't blame them) and in turn often wargaming first strike from warsaw pact side. Supposedly at one point, early in 1990s, some high rank officers from both sides got to meet and look at unredacted data about capacity of both sides in Europe, with NATO representative going "oh god, with those numbers you could steamroll us, why you didn't?" and Soviet one being "ugh we could have done with much less forces, we didn't actually want to start a war"
moron4hire 5y ago
My parents were linguists in the US Army, having studied Russian. I got a print of one of these maps of Washington DC framed for my mom for Christmas one year. She has it hanging in her office. Seeing the phonetic Cyrillic names for places was kind of a trip.
gerdesj 5y ago
Well that's a bit odd - no Yeovil. I live in Yeovil, Somerset, UK. Small town ~40,000 people these days. There's an Italian helicopter factory here - Leonardo. Back in the day it was called Westland Helicopters and before that Westland Aircraft. During WW2, WA manufactured the Lysander, which was a sneaky aircraft. Quite a lot of other things were made here too and since. I suspect that the whole set of plans are not available.
- Animats 5y ago
  "And remember this well: If you are not one up, you are one down".
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Some really nice ones of Bristol though that I went through. Damn, how many West Country folks are on here?
ggm 5y ago
Would the US u2 overflight maps of the USSR be broadly similar? I'm not trying for whataboutery, it's the comparison of interest: how well an you account for place names and features from what's available? The Russians had access to a lot of information, OS maps for instance. All the Americans had were often photogrammetry and after satellite imagery. For the DDay invasion, It is said the allied planners asked to see tourist maps, snaps, and postcards to help compile planning maps for the invasion and immediate days after. Beach profiles, off beach structures to compare with aerial photography for bunker finding, tide profiles, you name it. (Like other art college students my mum did map tracing at uni preparing invasion maps and escape maps for the troops)
- aerostable_slug 5y ago
  The product of overflights, satellite balloon and aircraft, were absolutely used for cartography. NIMA (now NGIA) spent lots and lots of time making maps (how else would SAC find their way to the ICBM complex at Laputa?). Not only was getting ahold of Soviet maps something a bit more complex than just going to the local gas station, but the Soviets actually purposely introduced inaccuracies into their civilian-issue maps: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-maps-were-faked-for-50-years.html https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-...
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > but the Soviets actually purposely introduced inaccuracies into their civilian-issue maps China does the same thing today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China#Coordinate_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat... > GCJ-02 (colloquially Mars Coordinates, officially Chinese: 地形图非线性保密处理算法; lit. 'Topographic map non-linear confidentiality algorithm')[21] is a geodetic datum formulated by the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (Chinese: 国测局; pinyin: guó-cè-jú), and based on WGS-84.[22] It uses an obfuscation algorithm[23] which adds apparently random offsets to both the latitude and longitude, with the alleged goal of improving national security.[
    - 5y ago
threeio 5y ago
I have two of these, one for Washington DC and Baltimore area and one for SF Bay... absolutely love them, although they drove the framing guy -crazy- because they're slightly smaller at the top than the bottom :) https://mapshow.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/J-10.html https://mapshow.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/J-10.html https://mapshow.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/J-18-1.html https://mapshow.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/J-18-1.html
tomkat0789 5y ago
For a similar rabbit hole with US maps, somewhere (a Google away - sorry I'm on my phone) there's historic USGS Topo maps of the USA. Once I found Chicago maps going back to the 1890s, and moving through the years you could see the city grow explosively in the early 20th century.
Stevvo 5y ago
Why does Russia have the best maps of Britain? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
kgeist 5y ago
The story goes that Soviet military/KGB maps of USSR were so precise and full of details even for unpopulated areas such as forests, my grandpa, who served in KGB, once secretly took one of such classified maps with him to better orient in a forest when mushroom picking, because civilian-level maps were pretty poor. Once, he noticed that a window in his appartment was closed in a different way than he had left it. Being a KGB man himself, he realized someone had visited his home when he was away. He searched the rooms and found radio bugs, i.e. they were aware he took the maps and started spying on him, suspecting that his goal was to sell those maps to Americans or something like that. Somehow his explanation that he only wanted to have a good mushroom picking experience convinced the superiors, he wasn't charged and stayed in KGB, later becoming a colonel.
- aasasd 5y ago
  The maps, at least at the scale of around 1:500000 or 1:200000, are still used by hikers and such outdoorsy folk. (Or they were ten years ago, dunno about now.)
- sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
  Your grandpa is/was a fun guy for sure - he told you ridiculous stories that you seem to completely believe to.
aasasd 5y ago
Dunno about Western maps, but old ‘military’ maps of Russia are now frequently used by hikers, climbers and such folk to plan outdoors routes. There are tons of details on the maps, and I guess nature doesn't change that much in the 60 years or so (until now, at least). (Maybe something digital is more in use now, compared to ten years ago—but I sorta doubt it, since neither satellite maps nor vector maps tend to mark useful features in the outbacks. Maybe OSM comes close, since hikers themselves put in the routes and markings there. There's also https://opentopomap.org https://opentopomap.org — dunno how good it is.)
- dalkvist 5y ago
  Opentopomap is openstreetmap with height data primarily from the space shuttle LIDAR missions. The resolution is good for 60N-60S, towards the poles not so much.
timonoko 5y ago
These maps are good snapshots of history. East side of Tana Fjord in Norway is now totally abandoned. And yet I found washing machines and TVs -- how were these powered? Soviet map to the rescue: 100 kilometer long power line came from Berlevåg once.
paganel 5y ago
For those that might be interested, there's also an interactive version of the Soviet maps for Romania, at this website [1]. One has to click the "Harta de fundal" link from the top menu-bar and in there click on "Harti sovietice". You might want to unselect all the checkboxes on the left if you only want to see the map (this is an archeology-related mashup). All in all the Soviets did a really excellent job. I suspect they had their inside sources in the Romanian State map-making department (a military-run department at the time, most of its work was a State-secret), because they're as detailed as the "official" Romanian military maps that were to be released about 10 years later (these Soviets maps are approximately from the 1960s, the Romanian military maps were released in the mid 1970s) [1] https://map.cimec.ro/Mapserver/# https://map.cimec.ro/Mapserver/#
trhway 5y ago
USSR also similarly maintained very detailed ocean/sea maps, and the stream of corrections and new information was coming non-stop (i had a relative working in the hydrography department at the Navy base). People in marine navigation may know the company Transas - a USSR/Russian company, a digital marine navigation systems pioneer back in 199x and one of the leaders in the industry and which supply digital navigation systems for example even to Sweden and Germany Navies - the company was founded in 1990 by some very entrepreneurial and technical people who kind of "privatized/commercialized" ocean/sea mapping and navigational info collected in USSR.
svilen_dobrev 5y ago
check also https://maps.vlasenko.net/soviet-military-topographic-map/ https://maps.vlasenko.net/soviet-military-topographic-map/ like https://maps.vlasenko.net/soviet-military-topographic-map/map50k.html https://maps.vlasenko.net/soviet-military-topographic-map/ma... etc inside domain. Text is mostly in russian. But there are quite a few maps.. And as a mountain-walker, i found sometimes their maps are better than our own :/

ggm 5y ago

And the rest of the world.

dayofthedaleks 5y ago
Whoops! How Atlanticist of me.

I posted the same in the other thread, but since we're here -- here is my 1:500k map of south/central Ohio. You can see Columbus and Dayton at the top. https://imgur.com/a/wlN5aAe https://imgur.com/a/wlN5aAe (right-click, open in new tab to really zoom in)

akoster 5y ago

Wired had a interesting piece on this back in 2015: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/ And with some spooky details on San Diego, California (and many other places): https://www.wired.com/2015/07/soviet-militarys-eerily-detailed-guide-san-diego/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/soviet-militarys-eerily-detail...

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

I checked the area where I grew up. There's a minor but quite obvious mistake. Interesting to see the place names phoneticised to Cyrillic. Not sure how useful that would have been in an invasion.

nradov 5y ago
They weren't seriously planning a land invasion. Air and missile strikes only.
p_l 5y ago
Some of it was to make it easier to talk for people who didn't know the language of the country on the map, I heard that polish military maps of the UK apparently were "localized" the same way - and the persistent rumour is that under "take all of europe in counterstrike to prevent USA supplying the invasion" plan, Polish forces were to occupy major portions of UK.
aerostable_slug 5y ago
Imagine trying to figure out how to correctly say "Port Hueneme" if you're a random Soviet officer. Probably best they were phoneticized if only so other Soviets would have some idea of what you were talking about. Also, I think we can feel somewhat confident that over the years the Soviets intended for special operations to take place on American soil. Few non-nuclear things screw with preparations for a deployment overseas more than transmission power lines for San Diego and/or Norfolk dropping, or an outbreak of a crop disease, or what have you. If you're feeling sporty, assassinate a few people (preferably false flag ops to stoke domestic divisions).
kingcharles 5y ago
Would have been horrible when it came to converting Welsh: https://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/ https://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysil...

portlander52232 5y ago

Man, it’s creepy to find your house on a Soviet map.

wolverine876 5y ago

Interesting selection of cities: https://redatlasbook.com/cityplansus https://redatlasbook.com/cityplansus No Detroit (probably in the top 5-7 in population then, and a major manufacturing center), Houston, Philadelphia, New Orleans (control access to the Mississippi River) ... but they do have Worcester, MA. Edit: Possibly that list is a subset of the Soviet maps selected by the publisher.

monkeybutton 5y ago
Vancouver, Montréal and Halifax but no Ottawa, Toronto or Deep/Chalk River. Bizarre! The only connection I can make is that Vancouver, Montréal and Halifax are navigable by ocean going ships and the others are not?
- zelienople 5y ago
  I spent my childhood worrying about a nuclear attack on my city and now I find out that we didn't even make it to the map? I am disappoint.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    My city in eastern Europe was close to a nuclear target. So much for USA liberating us from Russian influence. I guess we can't be under communist regime if we are dead.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > My city in eastern Europe was close to a nuclear target. So much for USA liberating us from Russian influence. How are those two sentences related?
      - scotty79 5y ago
        Imagine being a hostage and finding out that snipers were intending to shoot the criminal through you.

the_af 5y ago

> "The maps are still a taboo topic in Russia today, so it’s impossible to know for sure, but what they’re finding suggests that the Soviet military maps were far more than an invasion plan. Rather, they were a framework for organizing much of what the Soviets knew about the world, almost like a mashup of Google Maps and Wikipedia" This doesn't surprise me and it shouldn't anyone else either. It's obvious these weren't meant for invasion or occupation of North America, which were never part of Soviet planning or policy. A nuclear exchange with the US? Maybe. War in Europe? Sure. But invasion of North America? No, why would they? It would be costly and likely to end in defeat, and for what end goal? Most Soviet war plans that we know of where either defensive in nature (arguably; preemptive strikes or even reactive after an attack), reacting to perceived threats to their satellite countries or assets, or corrective actions against their allies when they were perceived to get out of line with the Kremlin. None of these fit invading North America, however cinematic that notion might be.

karaterobot 5y ago
I would have thought it was unlikely that an apparatus as large as the Soviet Union would never have drawn up plans for a contingency in which politics forced them to consider an invasion of their rival superpower. Not that they would intend to use them, but to have gone to the trouble of mapping the military targets at such a scale, then never spending time to have someone think about how they'd occupy those sites if they had to, seems so foreign to how I expect military brains to work, that I have trouble believing it's true. A brief Google search doesn't show any (credible) plans, so maybe you're right: but, absence of evidence, especially in a secretive bureaucracy that actively expunged so much of its archives, is not necessarily evidence of absence!
- p_l 5y ago
  Reality is probably more unrealistic than people think, and funnier to boot. People who were at least slightly aware of military planning in Poland but not necessarily with the "why" of the plan (this included pretty big portion of citizenry, due to conscription) tend to think Warsaw Pact's claims about defensive warfare were just lies. Meanwhile the defensive warfare concept was to counterattack once the "inevitable NATO strike against communism" happens, to as quickly as possible take logistic routes that America could use to wage war in Europe. Atlantic is pretty big issue for any invasion not just towards America, after all. Then you hit the next layer of hilarious misunderstandings (YMMV) which is western planners somehow not getting the memo that Soviet decision makers in Moscow actually believed in NATO first strike (honestly, I don't blame them) and in turn often wargaming first strike from warsaw pact side. Supposedly at one point, early in 1990s, some high rank officers from both sides got to meet and look at unredacted data about capacity of both sides in Europe, with NATO representative going "oh god, with those numbers you could steamroll us, why you didn't?" and Soviet one being "ugh we could have done with much less forces, we didn't actually want to start a war"

moron4hire 5y ago

My parents were linguists in the US Army, having studied Russian. I got a print of one of these maps of Washington DC framed for my mom for Christmas one year. She has it hanging in her office. Seeing the phonetic Cyrillic names for places was kind of a trip.

gerdesj 5y ago

Well that's a bit odd - no Yeovil. I live in Yeovil, Somerset, UK. Small town ~40,000 people these days. There's an Italian helicopter factory here - Leonardo. Back in the day it was called Westland Helicopters and before that Westland Aircraft. During WW2, WA manufactured the Lysander, which was a sneaky aircraft. Quite a lot of other things were made here too and since. I suspect that the whole set of plans are not available.

Animats 5y ago
"And remember this well: If you are not one up, you are one down".
kingcharles 5y ago
Some really nice ones of Bristol though that I went through. Damn, how many West Country folks are on here?

ggm 5y ago

Would the US u2 overflight maps of the USSR be broadly similar? I'm not trying for whataboutery, it's the comparison of interest: how well an you account for place names and features from what's available? The Russians had access to a lot of information, OS maps for instance. All the Americans had were often photogrammetry and after satellite imagery. For the DDay invasion, It is said the allied planners asked to see tourist maps, snaps, and postcards to help compile planning maps for the invasion and immediate days after. Beach profiles, off beach structures to compare with aerial photography for bunker finding, tide profiles, you name it. (Like other art college students my mum did map tracing at uni preparing invasion maps and escape maps for the troops)

aerostable_slug 5y ago
The product of overflights, satellite balloon and aircraft, were absolutely used for cartography. NIMA (now NGIA) spent lots and lots of time making maps (how else would SAC find their way to the ICBM complex at Laputa?). Not only was getting ahold of Soviet maps something a bit more complex than just going to the local gas station, but the Soviets actually purposely introduced inaccuracies into their civilian-issue maps: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-maps-were-faked-for-50-years.html https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-...
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > but the Soviets actually purposely introduced inaccuracies into their civilian-issue maps China does the same thing today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China#Coordinate_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat... > GCJ-02 (colloquially Mars Coordinates, officially Chinese: 地形图非线性保密处理算法; lit. 'Topographic map non-linear confidentiality algorithm')[21] is a geodetic datum formulated by the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (Chinese: 国测局; pinyin: guó-cè-jú), and based on WGS-84.[22] It uses an obfuscation algorithm[23] which adds apparently random offsets to both the latitude and longitude, with the alleged goal of improving national security.[
  - 5y ago

threeio 5y ago

I have two of these, one for Washington DC and Baltimore area and one for SF Bay... absolutely love them, although they drove the framing guy -crazy- because they're slightly smaller at the top than the bottom :) https://mapshow.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/J-10.html https://mapshow.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/J-10.html https://mapshow.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/J-18-1.html https://mapshow.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/J-18-1.html

tomkat0789 5y ago

For a similar rabbit hole with US maps, somewhere (a Google away - sorry I'm on my phone) there's historic USGS Topo maps of the USA. Once I found Chicago maps going back to the 1890s, and moving through the years you could see the city grow explosively in the early 20th century.

Stevvo 5y ago

Why does Russia have the best maps of Britain? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ

kgeist 5y ago

The story goes that Soviet military/KGB maps of USSR were so precise and full of details even for unpopulated areas such as forests, my grandpa, who served in KGB, once secretly took one of such classified maps with him to better orient in a forest when mushroom picking, because civilian-level maps were pretty poor. Once, he noticed that a window in his appartment was closed in a different way than he had left it. Being a KGB man himself, he realized someone had visited his home when he was away. He searched the rooms and found radio bugs, i.e. they were aware he took the maps and started spying on him, suspecting that his goal was to sell those maps to Americans or something like that. Somehow his explanation that he only wanted to have a good mushroom picking experience convinced the superiors, he wasn't charged and stayed in KGB, later becoming a colonel.

aasasd 5y ago
The maps, at least at the scale of around 1:500000 or 1:200000, are still used by hikers and such outdoorsy folk. (Or they were ten years ago, dunno about now.)
sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
Your grandpa is/was a fun guy for sure - he told you ridiculous stories that you seem to completely believe to.

aasasd 5y ago

Dunno about Western maps, but old ‘military’ maps of Russia are now frequently used by hikers, climbers and such folk to plan outdoors routes. There are tons of details on the maps, and I guess nature doesn't change that much in the 60 years or so (until now, at least). (Maybe something digital is more in use now, compared to ten years ago—but I sorta doubt it, since neither satellite maps nor vector maps tend to mark useful features in the outbacks. Maybe OSM comes close, since hikers themselves put in the routes and markings there. There's also https://opentopomap.org https://opentopomap.org — dunno how good it is.)

dalkvist 5y ago
Opentopomap is openstreetmap with height data primarily from the space shuttle LIDAR missions. The resolution is good for 60N-60S, towards the poles not so much.

timonoko 5y ago

These maps are good snapshots of history. East side of Tana Fjord in Norway is now totally abandoned. And yet I found washing machines and TVs -- how were these powered? Soviet map to the rescue: 100 kilometer long power line came from Berlevåg once.

paganel 5y ago

For those that might be interested, there's also an interactive version of the Soviet maps for Romania, at this website [1]. One has to click the "Harta de fundal" link from the top menu-bar and in there click on "Harti sovietice". You might want to unselect all the checkboxes on the left if you only want to see the map (this is an archeology-related mashup). All in all the Soviets did a really excellent job. I suspect they had their inside sources in the Romanian State map-making department (a military-run department at the time, most of its work was a State-secret), because they're as detailed as the "official" Romanian military maps that were to be released about 10 years later (these Soviets maps are approximately from the 1960s, the Romanian military maps were released in the mid 1970s) [1] https://map.cimec.ro/Mapserver/# https://map.cimec.ro/Mapserver/#

trhway 5y ago

USSR also similarly maintained very detailed ocean/sea maps, and the stream of corrections and new information was coming non-stop (i had a relative working in the hydrography department at the Navy base). People in marine navigation may know the company Transas - a USSR/Russian company, a digital marine navigation systems pioneer back in 199x and one of the leaders in the industry and which supply digital navigation systems for example even to Sweden and Germany Navies - the company was founded in 1990 by some very entrepreneurial and technical people who kind of "privatized/commercialized" ocean/sea mapping and navigational info collected in USSR.

svilen_dobrev 5y ago

check also https://maps.vlasenko.net/soviet-military-topographic-map/ https://maps.vlasenko.net/soviet-military-topographic-map/ like https://maps.vlasenko.net/soviet-military-topographic-map/map50k.html https://maps.vlasenko.net/soviet-military-topographic-map/ma... etc inside domain. Text is mostly in russian. But there are quite a few maps.. And as a mountain-walker, i found sometimes their maps are better than our own :/