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> "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 f

by 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"
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    The Soviet Union invaded and took control of many of their neighbors, including most of Eastern and Central Europe, Central Asia (including invading Afghanistan in 1979), as well as creating and supporting regimes elsewhere (Cuba, etc.). When the people of some countries (e.g., Hungary, Czechoslovakia) tried to form democracies, the Soviets sent in tanks. They tried to sieze Berlin early on. It's not at all far-fetched that they would try to expand further into Europe. Do you have good sources for the claims above? It looks pretty revisionist, and matches Soviet propaganda, to suggest the Soviets weren't aggressive and expansionist.
    - wolf550e 5y ago
      Both things are true. The Soviets were very afraid of NATO because NATO was always richer and had more population and industry. So the Soviets wanted a lot of buffer. To have the front far away from Russia, and be able to fall back a long way before being forced to fight on Russian land. That is what the conquest of Eastern Europe was for. The propping up of communist states worldwide was an attempt to not get surrounded by American client states / satellites / allies. Look at China propping up North Korea. Why? Because they see South Korea as an American client state and they do not want to have a border with it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#Strategic_Air_Command https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#Strategic_Air_Com... for what made Soviets think maybe NATO is serious about first strike.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        Yes, the poor victim Soviets. Not expansionist at all. You can make up whatever rationalizations you want, but they did conquer other countries on a scale rarely seen in history. The rest, your claims about their motivations and poor victimhood, are baseless.
        the_af 5y ago
        > You can make up whatever rationalizations The parent post is not "making up" rationalizations nor do I see an attempt to justify Soviet repression. The Soviets were victims... earlier, during World War II, when their territory was razed to the ground and their people targeted for total racial extermination, and also faced the brunt of that war -- the most destructive war ever -- and did most of the blood shedding. That has to leave a permanent mark in the national psyche. A lot of what they did afterwards was making sure nobody and no country was ever in the position to do that to them, again. They definitely were creating buffer zones to protect their homeland, and I believe most modern analyses agree on this. This doesn't make them saints. Yes, they were repressive and brutal to satellites they believed felt out of line. But it's not "making up rationalizations", it's what actually happened, and it does explain things. Also, > Not expansionist at all Most powers were expansionist in some way or the other during World War II and its immediate aftermath.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
It is one thing to note. The US "homeland" has not been at play.for a real invasion. Nuclear destruction sure. Limited bombing like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 Not Germans, Japanese, Soviets, North Koreas, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, Korea, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Serbia, Loas, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Cambodia, Granada, Haiti, Sudan, Uganda, Nicaragua. Whereas for Russia it is a near and existential threat, that they have lived through several times.
- paganel 5y ago
  > Whereas for Russia it is a near and existential threat, that they have lived through several times. I think people tend to forget that detail a lot of times because the history of the WW2 Eastern Front is many times only presented as an after-thought in Western historiography. There are some mentions of Stalingrad, the Leningrad siege, maybe the Kursk tank battle on more technically-inclined web forums, and that's about it. Granted, a lot of the details of the war are either hidden somewhere in some Moscow archives or have been burned to the ground in Germany during the final stages of the war, plus the people who went in that meat-grinder, more exactly through that hell, were not as "interviewed" (for lack of a better term) post-WW2 as compared to the people who had been active in the Pacific or in Western Europe. To say nothing of their (lacking) media presence, in fiction or not (there are countless documentaries about war in Western Europe, less so when it comes to the Eastern Front). I was fortunate enough to have known a close person who had been a soldier on the Eastern Front (he had been active on the Axis side). He and his comrades went through hell, multiple times. Everything around them was hell. I can only imagine that the view from the other side was pretty much the same one.
TrainedMonkey 5y ago
So, I don't know if Soviets actually prepared NA invasion plans. However Pentagon has whole archives of plans of all sizes. Starting from infiltration of a a compound by a Seal team deployed from a submarine to invasions of pretty much everywhere under all kinds of scenarios. I don't exactly know rationale behind these plans, but maybe they are amazing at training military planners/leaders and some of the are probably occasionally dusted off and even used.
- drran 5y ago
  If you will be tasked to take a compound or a country, you will write a perfect plan in minutes, of course.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Its interesting the level of paranoia Americans felt about the USSR. That the idea of a USSR invasion ever entered the public imagination is genuinely laughable, any such invasion would stand no chance and benefit the USSR not one bit. A ground invasion of the USSR was more plausible (but still not plausible) given that the US at least could have used Western Europe as a launching pad. Duking it out in the Fulda gap would be dumb and unlikely, but it’s orders of magnitude more likely than the USSR deciding to take on the pacific fleet in the hopes of landing ground troops on a Californian beach. With some retrospect I think that on the whole the USSR had more to fear from aggressive US policy more than the US had to fear from aggressive USSR policy. And both were right to fear accidents and miscommunication leading to disaster, which is certainly the most likely cause of conflict between the two.
- dayofthedaleks 5y ago
  A ground invasion of the USSR wasn’t just plausible, a bunch of Allied troops left over from WWI were landed at Arkhangelsk to actively fight the Bolsheviks in cooperation with White Russian forces. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Russia_intervention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Russia_intervention
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Hardly an attempt to sieze Russia.
    - dayofthedaleks 5y ago
      Maybe not an attempt at annexation, but Winston Churchill made speeches late in life bemoaning the effort’s failure to ‘strangle bolshevism in its cradle.’ Tell me where things would have stopped if the Whites, Allies, and Czechoslovak Legion had gained the upper hand.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        > Tell me where things would have stopped if the Whites, Allies, and Czechoslovak Legion had gained the upper hand. In no way would it involve the UK or US controlling any part of Russia. Also, the Whites were Russian. The Bolsheviks had no claim on representing Russia any more than the Whites did.
ccday 5y ago
A great quote from Lincoln: > From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- OJFord 5y ago
  That is a great quote. But isn't the obvious answer From the South, or Canada, or a fracturing of states within? (I'm not American nor living there btw, I don't mean it as any sort of political point.) It is also perhaps dated in the send that it assumes crushing defeat happens on the battlefield.
  - vopi 5y ago
    The fracturing of the states is what he is referring to: "we will live forever or die by suicide". It case you don't know, he was the president when states did fracture (US civil war).
  - ccday 5y ago
    This is purely my opinion: Lincoln’s point was that the threat of civil war or violent dissent (what we today would call domestic terrorism) is a much greater threat to the US than foreign states. I think this remains true today. In fact, what you mention when you say a fracturing of states within was exactly what he was talking about. A foreign state would need to cross the Atlantic ocean, contend with the most powerful Navy on earth several times over, land in either Canada or Mexico, both of which are US allies, and then mount a land invasion on the US homeland. It’s hard to imagine how that would be possible. You raise a good point when you say crushing defeat does not necessarily happen on the conventional battlefield. Nuclear weapons create the possibility of MAD, and other “battlefields” like the cyberspace or global economic warfare have developed since Lincoln’s time. I still think the essence of what he said is true though: the greatest threat to the US comes from within.
cm2187 5y ago
What I read is that they had plans for invasions of some western European countries, but not the nuclear-armed ones.
mc32 5y ago
One thing that could make some sense is if the US surrendered and they had to come in and take over the government --like governing us. In that unlikely scenario, they would need to have this info. On the other hand, why not just have a puppet government instead? Their long term goal was to Sovietize the world so, who knows, maybe these were dreamer cartographers.
hypertexthero 5y ago
C’mon, haven’t you watched Invasion U.S.A. starring Chuck Norris?!
Aspos 5y ago
There were multiple reasons to make the maps. An asteroid smashes into Mexico and millions of refugees are rushing to the southern states. What logistical implications to expect? New factories are being built in Ohio. Why? Soyuz crash-landed in Arizona. When US will get to it? US is moving Minutemen rockets from Memphis. Where to? Los Angeles is in riots. How will it affect SU? Somebody tasked with analyzing such intel would have to have maps. Maps are important and keeping mapmakers' skills sharp required a constant workload. Teaching fresh intel recruits about the US knowing they are never going to visit the US required maps. There were gazillion reasons to produce and maintain maps in the Soviet Union. And I am glad they did. I used to use Soviet military maps for hiking back in the day.
baybal2 5y ago
> Most Soviet war plans that we know of where either defensive in nature Soviet Union had an invasion plan of Western Europe. That's the end of the story.
- the_af 5y ago
  Which one? It's possible one existed, so I'd like the exact title so we can debate the aims of the plan. For example, the "Seven Days to the River Rhine" plan was explicitly a reaction to an hypothetical NATO first strike, which the Soviets believed was a possibility. > That's the end of the story. No, discussion doesn't work like that.
- sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
  NATO also had such plans. That's the end of no story.
- arethuza 5y ago
  The United States had a plan that would have killed one third of all people on the planet (1 billion of the 3 billion alive in the early 1960s). Source: "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg Militaries do all kinds of planning - doesn't mean that anyone has the intention of actually executing them. e.g. The UK did war planning of invading Eastern Europe after WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable Obviously, the conclusion of this planning was that it was a bad idea... Before WW2 the United States had a plan on how to fight the British Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red Around the same time the Canadians had plans for attacking the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_Scheme_No._1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_Scheme_No._1
sedan_baklazhan 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" Thanks, I've had a good laugh. The maps were declassified in late 1980's/early 1990's and since then are freely available. I, from Russia, have been browsing these maps online for years. I'm still waiting for the KGB to come and take me...
- the_af 5y ago
  Haha, I was quoting the article, the words are not mine. My point is that it's obvious these weren't invasion plans.
ptr 5y ago
The Soviets definitely had extensive and detailed invasion plans of Sweden, a neutral country. Sure, offense is the best defense, but you make them sound as if they were just protecting what was theirs.
- nosianu 5y ago
  You don't provide any context. All the great powers have all kinds of ridiculous plans [0]. None of them are meant to be "first tier", they are meant to be used under certain bad circumstances when things have already gone down the drain. I doubt that that plan for invasion of Sweden was meant to be used with nothing else going on forcing them to do so. So, could you provide the context those plans were made in and for, please? If it turns out the SU indeed just wanted to become bigger without any other pressure I'll admit you were right, but I doubt it. [0] I've no intention to single out the US specifically, it's just that this one was easy to come to my mind as an example: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be... -- I doubt the US would actually send an invasion force, this is more a political tool. If you cut the context you could claim "US has plans to invade the Netherlands", which would be highly misleading.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  Every good enough IT team has the "Restoring to the baremetal from the off-site backups" plan. Yet they never intend to put it in action.
anovikov 5y ago
That's true, Soviet military textbooks clearly state the defensive combat to be a primary kind of it, and Soviet military training devoted about 2x more time and resources to prepare for defensive vs offensive action. This should come logical since Soviet presence in the outside world was far outstretched, going deep into the countries with no cultural or historical ties with them and they knew it was hard to sustain. Probably changed today.
lr1970 5y ago
> But invasion of North America? No, why would they? It would be costly and likely to end in defeat, and for what end goal? For Soviets invading North America was logistically impossible. Soviet Union never possessed a navy large and strong enough for such a feat.
- the_af 5y ago
  Exactly, it was logistically impossible and the Soviet Union was aware of this. That's part of my point.

by the_af 5y ago

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"
- wolverine876 5y ago
  The Soviet Union invaded and took control of many of their neighbors, including most of Eastern and Central Europe, Central Asia (including invading Afghanistan in 1979), as well as creating and supporting regimes elsewhere (Cuba, etc.). When the people of some countries (e.g., Hungary, Czechoslovakia) tried to form democracies, the Soviets sent in tanks. They tried to sieze Berlin early on. It's not at all far-fetched that they would try to expand further into Europe. Do you have good sources for the claims above? It looks pretty revisionist, and matches Soviet propaganda, to suggest the Soviets weren't aggressive and expansionist.
  - wolf550e 5y ago
    Both things are true. The Soviets were very afraid of NATO because NATO was always richer and had more population and industry. So the Soviets wanted a lot of buffer. To have the front far away from Russia, and be able to fall back a long way before being forced to fight on Russian land. That is what the conquest of Eastern Europe was for. The propping up of communist states worldwide was an attempt to not get surrounded by American client states / satellites / allies. Look at China propping up North Korea. Why? Because they see South Korea as an American client state and they do not want to have a border with it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#Strategic_Air_Command https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#Strategic_Air_Com... for what made Soviets think maybe NATO is serious about first strike.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      Yes, the poor victim Soviets. Not expansionist at all. You can make up whatever rationalizations you want, but they did conquer other countries on a scale rarely seen in history. The rest, your claims about their motivations and poor victimhood, are baseless.
      - the_af 5y ago
        > You can make up whatever rationalizations The parent post is not "making up" rationalizations nor do I see an attempt to justify Soviet repression. The Soviets were victims... earlier, during World War II, when their territory was razed to the ground and their people targeted for total racial extermination, and also faced the brunt of that war -- the most destructive war ever -- and did most of the blood shedding. That has to leave a permanent mark in the national psyche. A lot of what they did afterwards was making sure nobody and no country was ever in the position to do that to them, again. They definitely were creating buffer zones to protect their homeland, and I believe most modern analyses agree on this. This doesn't make them saints. Yes, they were repressive and brutal to satellites they believed felt out of line. But it's not "making up rationalizations", it's what actually happened, and it does explain things. Also, > Not expansionist at all Most powers were expansionist in some way or the other during World War II and its immediate aftermath.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

It is one thing to note. The US "homeland" has not been at play.for a real invasion. Nuclear destruction sure. Limited bombing like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 Not Germans, Japanese, Soviets, North Koreas, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, Korea, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Serbia, Loas, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Cambodia, Granada, Haiti, Sudan, Uganda, Nicaragua. Whereas for Russia it is a near and existential threat, that they have lived through several times.

paganel 5y ago
> Whereas for Russia it is a near and existential threat, that they have lived through several times. I think people tend to forget that detail a lot of times because the history of the WW2 Eastern Front is many times only presented as an after-thought in Western historiography. There are some mentions of Stalingrad, the Leningrad siege, maybe the Kursk tank battle on more technically-inclined web forums, and that's about it. Granted, a lot of the details of the war are either hidden somewhere in some Moscow archives or have been burned to the ground in Germany during the final stages of the war, plus the people who went in that meat-grinder, more exactly through that hell, were not as "interviewed" (for lack of a better term) post-WW2 as compared to the people who had been active in the Pacific or in Western Europe. To say nothing of their (lacking) media presence, in fiction or not (there are countless documentaries about war in Western Europe, less so when it comes to the Eastern Front). I was fortunate enough to have known a close person who had been a soldier on the Eastern Front (he had been active on the Axis side). He and his comrades went through hell, multiple times. Everything around them was hell. I can only imagine that the view from the other side was pretty much the same one.

TrainedMonkey 5y ago

So, I don't know if Soviets actually prepared NA invasion plans. However Pentagon has whole archives of plans of all sizes. Starting from infiltration of a a compound by a Seal team deployed from a submarine to invasions of pretty much everywhere under all kinds of scenarios. I don't exactly know rationale behind these plans, but maybe they are amazing at training military planners/leaders and some of the are probably occasionally dusted off and even used.

drran 5y ago
If you will be tasked to take a compound or a country, you will write a perfect plan in minutes, of course.

ashtonkem 5y ago

Its interesting the level of paranoia Americans felt about the USSR. That the idea of a USSR invasion ever entered the public imagination is genuinely laughable, any such invasion would stand no chance and benefit the USSR not one bit. A ground invasion of the USSR was more plausible (but still not plausible) given that the US at least could have used Western Europe as a launching pad. Duking it out in the Fulda gap would be dumb and unlikely, but it’s orders of magnitude more likely than the USSR deciding to take on the pacific fleet in the hopes of landing ground troops on a Californian beach. With some retrospect I think that on the whole the USSR had more to fear from aggressive US policy more than the US had to fear from aggressive USSR policy. And both were right to fear accidents and miscommunication leading to disaster, which is certainly the most likely cause of conflict between the two.

dayofthedaleks 5y ago
A ground invasion of the USSR wasn’t just plausible, a bunch of Allied troops left over from WWI were landed at Arkhangelsk to actively fight the Bolsheviks in cooperation with White Russian forces. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Russia_intervention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Russia_intervention
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Hardly an attempt to sieze Russia.
  - dayofthedaleks 5y ago
    Maybe not an attempt at annexation, but Winston Churchill made speeches late in life bemoaning the effort’s failure to ‘strangle bolshevism in its cradle.’ Tell me where things would have stopped if the Whites, Allies, and Czechoslovak Legion had gained the upper hand.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > Tell me where things would have stopped if the Whites, Allies, and Czechoslovak Legion had gained the upper hand. In no way would it involve the UK or US controlling any part of Russia. Also, the Whites were Russian. The Bolsheviks had no claim on representing Russia any more than the Whites did.

ccday 5y ago

A great quote from Lincoln: > From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
OJFord 5y ago
That is a great quote. But isn't the obvious answer From the South, or Canada, or a fracturing of states within? (I'm not American nor living there btw, I don't mean it as any sort of political point.) It is also perhaps dated in the send that it assumes crushing defeat happens on the battlefield.
- vopi 5y ago
  The fracturing of the states is what he is referring to: "we will live forever or die by suicide". It case you don't know, he was the president when states did fracture (US civil war).
- ccday 5y ago
  This is purely my opinion: Lincoln’s point was that the threat of civil war or violent dissent (what we today would call domestic terrorism) is a much greater threat to the US than foreign states. I think this remains true today. In fact, what you mention when you say a fracturing of states within was exactly what he was talking about. A foreign state would need to cross the Atlantic ocean, contend with the most powerful Navy on earth several times over, land in either Canada or Mexico, both of which are US allies, and then mount a land invasion on the US homeland. It’s hard to imagine how that would be possible. You raise a good point when you say crushing defeat does not necessarily happen on the conventional battlefield. Nuclear weapons create the possibility of MAD, and other “battlefields” like the cyberspace or global economic warfare have developed since Lincoln’s time. I still think the essence of what he said is true though: the greatest threat to the US comes from within.

cm2187 5y ago

What I read is that they had plans for invasions of some western European countries, but not the nuclear-armed ones.

mc32 5y ago

One thing that could make some sense is if the US surrendered and they had to come in and take over the government --like governing us. In that unlikely scenario, they would need to have this info. On the other hand, why not just have a puppet government instead? Their long term goal was to Sovietize the world so, who knows, maybe these were dreamer cartographers.

hypertexthero 5y ago

C’mon, haven’t you watched Invasion U.S.A. starring Chuck Norris?!

Aspos 5y ago

There were multiple reasons to make the maps. An asteroid smashes into Mexico and millions of refugees are rushing to the southern states. What logistical implications to expect? New factories are being built in Ohio. Why? Soyuz crash-landed in Arizona. When US will get to it? US is moving Minutemen rockets from Memphis. Where to? Los Angeles is in riots. How will it affect SU? Somebody tasked with analyzing such intel would have to have maps. Maps are important and keeping mapmakers' skills sharp required a constant workload. Teaching fresh intel recruits about the US knowing they are never going to visit the US required maps. There were gazillion reasons to produce and maintain maps in the Soviet Union. And I am glad they did. I used to use Soviet military maps for hiking back in the day.

baybal2 5y ago

> Most Soviet war plans that we know of where either defensive in nature Soviet Union had an invasion plan of Western Europe. That's the end of the story.

the_af 5y ago
Which one? It's possible one existed, so I'd like the exact title so we can debate the aims of the plan. For example, the "Seven Days to the River Rhine" plan was explicitly a reaction to an hypothetical NATO first strike, which the Soviets believed was a possibility. > That's the end of the story. No, discussion doesn't work like that.
sedan_baklazhan 5y ago
NATO also had such plans. That's the end of no story.
arethuza 5y ago
The United States had a plan that would have killed one third of all people on the planet (1 billion of the 3 billion alive in the early 1960s). Source: "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg Militaries do all kinds of planning - doesn't mean that anyone has the intention of actually executing them. e.g. The UK did war planning of invading Eastern Europe after WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable Obviously, the conclusion of this planning was that it was a bad idea... Before WW2 the United States had a plan on how to fight the British Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red Around the same time the Canadians had plans for attacking the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_Scheme_No._1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_Scheme_No._1

sedan_baklazhan 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" Thanks, I've had a good laugh. The maps were declassified in late 1980's/early 1990's and since then are freely available. I, from Russia, have been browsing these maps online for years. I'm still waiting for the KGB to come and take me...

the_af 5y ago
Haha, I was quoting the article, the words are not mine. My point is that it's obvious these weren't invasion plans.

ptr 5y ago

The Soviets definitely had extensive and detailed invasion plans of Sweden, a neutral country. Sure, offense is the best defense, but you make them sound as if they were just protecting what was theirs.

nosianu 5y ago
You don't provide any context. All the great powers have all kinds of ridiculous plans [0]. None of them are meant to be "first tier", they are meant to be used under certain bad circumstances when things have already gone down the drain. I doubt that that plan for invasion of Sweden was meant to be used with nothing else going on forcing them to do so. So, could you provide the context those plans were made in and for, please? If it turns out the SU indeed just wanted to become bigger without any other pressure I'll admit you were right, but I doubt it. [0] I've no intention to single out the US specifically, it's just that this one was easy to come to my mind as an example: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be... -- I doubt the US would actually send an invasion force, this is more a political tool. If you cut the context you could claim "US has plans to invade the Netherlands", which would be highly misleading.
justsomehnguy 5y ago
Every good enough IT team has the "Restoring to the baremetal from the off-site backups" plan. Yet they never intend to put it in action.

anovikov 5y ago

That's true, Soviet military textbooks clearly state the defensive combat to be a primary kind of it, and Soviet military training devoted about 2x more time and resources to prepare for defensive vs offensive action. This should come logical since Soviet presence in the outside world was far outstretched, going deep into the countries with no cultural or historical ties with them and they knew it was hard to sustain. Probably changed today.

lr1970 5y ago

> But invasion of North America? No, why would they? It would be costly and likely to end in defeat, and for what end goal? For Soviets invading North America was logistically impossible. Soviet Union never possessed a navy large and strong enough for such a feat.

the_af 5y ago
Exactly, it was logistically impossible and the Soviet Union was aware of this. That's part of my point.