9 ms·

Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers

171 points by aw3c2 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gaius 11y ago
If you are interested in wartime mapmaking and are in the UK, I highly recommend a visit to Hughenden http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hughenden/ http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hughenden/ And of course it's free for NT members :-)
ommunist 11y ago
So and where are IP rights of the still living former Soviet topographers? Is Mapstor paying royalty to specialists still operating at the 5th Cartography Enterprise in Minsk? British have been pirates for ages. Old habits never die.
- gwern 11y ago
  Presumably if there were any IP rights at all (what with it being a Communist state), they were assigned to the USSR government or, like products of the US government, are born into the public domain.
  - psykovsky 11y ago
    So, you mean everything Snowden released is also public domain? Because those maps were classified, didn't you read?
    - ghaff 11y ago
      IANAL, but my understanding is that all (with a few caveats) works created by US government employees are, in fact, in the public domain but that doesn't mean they can be made available publicly without restriction. http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html The fact that U.S. Government works are not protected under the U.S. Copyright Law does not create a requirement that all U.S. Government works be made publicly available without restriction (See Gellman, Robert M. Twin Evils: Government Copyright and Copyright-like Controls Over Government Information. Syracuse Law Review, 999, 1995. ADA394923). See Pfeiffer v. Central Intelligence Agency 62, 60 F.3d 861 (D.C. Cir. 1995). Federal laws and agency policies govern the public release of U.S. Government information. Examples include Executive Order 13292, Classified National Security Information , OMB Circular A-130,63 Management of Federal Information Resources, Department of Defense Directive 5230.9 Clearance of DoD Information for Public Release, April 9, 1996, ASD (PA) and DOD Instruction 5230.29 Security and Policy Review of DoD Information for Public Release.
      - psykovsky 11y ago
        Who the fuck are you? An astroturfer for the US gov?
      - ommunist 11y ago
        I like that. Is the US law universally applied in this part of the Galaxy?
    - gwern 11y ago
      You seem to be very aggressive and politicized on this topic (why did you throw in that totally gratuitous aside about the British always being pirates?). You might want to consider your comments more carefully.
      - ommunist 11y ago
        oh I am. My mother in law spent her entire youth drawing that exact maps.
  - ommunist 11y ago
    What? The USSR was one of the creators of the framework IP protection conventions. Russia is legal successor of the USSR and paid its foreign debts by the way. So what Mapstor does is plain ripping off Russian IP, since maps in question were produced after 1971. UPD: and Belarusian IP rights too. To be exact - legal department of the 5th Cartography Enterprise must file DMCA complaint agaist Mapstor and alike in such a situation. Please do not think you can violate IP property of the USSR. otherwise, your own heir will feel uneasy when such best ripping practices will be applied to them. Inherited property is still a property, isn't it?
    - gwern 11y ago
      So, then it was exactly as I said: it's either the government or the public's - not the original mapmakers like your mother-in-law. In pretty much no circumstance will the copyright on military maps ever belong to the original person who made them; such things are almost always going to be for-hire works. (Why on earth would any government or organization hire people for the extremely expensive and laborious work of making global maps and give the copyright to them?) If the governments still care, let them deal with it. It's no business of yours, nor do you need to white-knight on their behalf and throw in irrelevant arguments & gratuitious nationalist slurs.
      - ommunist 11y ago
        Looks like you know little about copyright law and how it applies. Very strange, you protect clear violators. Guys bought maps illegally, illegally exported classified material and are trading(!) classified information. Please, let me decide what is my business and what is not, thank you very much.
  - PeterisP 11y ago
    Copyright of USSR-made works is not public domain; tracing the owner is tricky at times, but [obviously] works where the copyright inheritor is hard to trace are pretty much the opposite of public domain - you're not allowed to copy w/o permission, even if that permission is tricky to obtain. The "made by gov't -> public domain" is an USA-specific detail that doesn't apply in most other places. If specific people owned the copyright, then it's as usual for any other works; if a specific USSR institution owned the copyright, then the ownership will be determined by the early 1990ies transition/reorganization laws and contracts; if 'USSR' owned it, then it's owned by Russia afterwards, not public domain.
    - ommunist 11y ago
      Very true. Thank you, You saved me from explaining that to guys below in this thread.
- PeterisP 11y ago
  Well, copyright would protect only making new copies and redistributing them, but it definitely is legal to resell the physical maps that were made by, e.g., 5th Cartography Enterprise in 1980ies, distributed throughout USSR in rather large quantities (the access was controlled, but there were many of those maps made) and then inherited by various ex-USSR countries and enterprises. No royalty or permission is required when [re]selling existing copies of copyrighted works, copyright protects only making copies.
  - ommunist 11y ago
    With exception to scales better than 1:50000 maps, I am afraid these are again classified in Russia. And there are these famous regulations applied - http://goo.gl/OF5bSn http://goo.gl/OF5bSn . Basically everything that has relief from 1:50000 is classified. However you can still have 1:20000 electronic relief of Russia from torrents, if you don't legally care.
gtirloni 11y ago
Guy’s company, Omnimap, was one of the first to import Soviet military maps to the West. Import is a huge stretch. More like stealing state secrets (and now admitting to it publicly?).
- ommunist 11y ago
  You are quite right.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  Technically, buying them - they were 'acquired' by the mentioned map making companies. TBF said state secrets kinda fell through when the USSR fell apart.
- gaius 11y ago
  Can you steal from a state that doesn't even exist at the time?
  - hewhowhineth 11y ago
    Not sure if this applies to the maps in question, but legal rights (and obligations) are handed down to successor country/countries. International treaties, debts and everything. Even Olympic medals I believe.
  - rdtsc 11y ago
    Yes you can, states that don't exist anymore have other states that inherit both their treasures, secrets, copyrighted works as well as debts. I understand that Russia is that state in general. The issue is complicated in case of ex Soviet Republics presumably. But I would guess you also can't just storm into Mosfilm or Lenfilm (movie production studios) and start copying all their movies made during the Soviet times and selling them for profit.
- PeterisP 11y ago
  Umm, in pretty much every country except Russia it is completely legal to violate Russian state secrets, and in pretty much any country other than USA it's legal to violate USA state secrets. The international buyer should be completely in the clear. Furthermore, it's very likely that the seller also is completly legal - as long as it's outside of Russia but one of ex-USSR republics, their new legal systems generally don't prohibit distributing USSR state secrets, only documents that are classified by their own new authorities.
huhtenberg 11y ago
> printed in red, was the Russian word секрет. Secret. That'd be "секретно". "Cекрет" is what pirates print on their treasure maps in kindergarten :)
- ak217 11y ago
  Which is a nice way of saying that Greg Miller is putting on airs without running his work by a native speaker.
  - rm445 11y ago
    Either that or the maps really had that word printed on them, for whatever reason.
- dima55 11y ago
  Hmmm? "Cекрет" is a noun. "Cекретно" is an adverb. Why is "Cекрет" inappropriate here?
  - wordbank 11y ago
    "Секрет" is more a social thing. Confidential information of bigger entities like government or business will be called "тайна".
- foobarian 11y ago
  Weird that Russians wouldn't use a native root for such a basic concept. Plenty of Slavic languages have variations on "tajna." Maybe it's some bureaucratic term using a Westernized root to be fashionable.
  - pandaman 11y ago
    In Russian Empire the imperial court mostly spoke French so lower classes, aspiring to sound more like nobles, borrowed a whole lot of French words. Because of this many Slavic words now sound archaic or pretensions to a Russian speaker. E.g. тайна in Russian is more like 'enigma', definitely not 'classified/secret'.
mashmac2 11y ago
I have a colleague who flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's, and said the Soviet civilian maps were just terrible - they'd show roads in the wrong places and didn't show secret military bases, etc. He figured this out after accidentally flying over a Soviet army base in what is today eastern Ukraine... and then talked his East German military connection into getting him a copy of the military maps.
- ommunist 11y ago
  As a former Soviet geodesist and forest inventory specialist, I must tell that military 1:50 000 maps are extremely accurate. What was intentionally skewed are civil 1:250 000 maps. The highest resolution and the best accuracy have been provided for so called forestry maps (1:10000).
  - themodelplumber 11y ago
    Wow, that's fascinating. Would you happen to have a website somewhere that documents your experiences? I'm really curious.
    - ommunist 11y ago
      Actually I keep aset of Soviet military maps for Afghanistan. If you are interested, We can make some field experiments if you are ready to get to Bagram with Trimble GPS. It is now controlled by USAF, so you can feel certainly protected.
      - themodelplumber 11y ago
        Ah, sorry, I was more interested in your biographical experiences, not so much the topographical details. :-) It's just that I don't know many who have had a job like yours, and in USSR.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - 11y ago
cpach 11y ago
”Anyone old enough to have lived through those paranoid days of mutually assured destruction will find it a bit disturbing to see familiar hometown streets and landmarks labeled in Cyrillic script.” I was only a child during the Cold War, but yes, a few years ago when I saw one of these Soviet maps of the Swedish Tiveden forest, it felt quite strange. The quality of the map was indeed magnificent.
n0us 11y ago
I often struggle to find even the most basic information in online maps. Worse, when I am in a rural area and have no service I find no service at all. I've thought recently about keeping some paper maps in my car for such occasions, might have to look into getting copies of some of these.
- aw3c2 11y ago
  Get OSMAnd.
- xnbya 11y ago
  In the UK on bing maps you can view the OS maps, they are probably the most detailed online maps.
  - david-given 11y ago
    There aren't many things which the British do really, really well, but the Ordnance Survey is one of them. Bing have a license, but it's geolocked so non-UK people don't see the OS maps. streetmap.co.uk is where I go; the actual website is terrible but they have the OS maps in 1:25000 and 1:50000 (and some of the non-topographic smaller scale maps): http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=191074&y=840453&z=0&sv=iv54+8uf&st=2&pc=iv54+8uf&mapp=map.srf&searchp=ids.srf http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=191074&y=840453&z=0&sv=iv54... Bear in mind that that map is suppose to be 4cm to a kilometre. On my screen it's about three times too big. After growing up with these maps (we were even taught how to read them at school!), visiting other countries and having to struggle with tourist maps is deeply painful.
olzhas 11y ago
Why people don't use USSR instead of Russia? or Soviet Russia?
temo4ka 11y ago
Off topic: is anyone else annoyed by those background-fixed image sections? Because the height of the section is bigger than the height of the viewport while scrolling past those sections it appears for a moment that the page stopped responding; the effect is especially prominent on wide screens.

171 points by aw3c2 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gaius 11y ago

If you are interested in wartime mapmaking and are in the UK, I highly recommend a visit to Hughenden http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hughenden/ http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hughenden/ And of course it's free for NT members :-)

ommunist 11y ago

So and where are IP rights of the still living former Soviet topographers? Is Mapstor paying royalty to specialists still operating at the 5th Cartography Enterprise in Minsk? British have been pirates for ages. Old habits never die.

gwern 11y ago
Presumably if there were any IP rights at all (what with it being a Communist state), they were assigned to the USSR government or, like products of the US government, are born into the public domain.
- psykovsky 11y ago
  So, you mean everything Snowden released is also public domain? Because those maps were classified, didn't you read?
  - ghaff 11y ago
    IANAL, but my understanding is that all (with a few caveats) works created by US government employees are, in fact, in the public domain but that doesn't mean they can be made available publicly without restriction. http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html The fact that U.S. Government works are not protected under the U.S. Copyright Law does not create a requirement that all U.S. Government works be made publicly available without restriction (See Gellman, Robert M. Twin Evils: Government Copyright and Copyright-like Controls Over Government Information. Syracuse Law Review, 999, 1995. ADA394923). See Pfeiffer v. Central Intelligence Agency 62, 60 F.3d 861 (D.C. Cir. 1995). Federal laws and agency policies govern the public release of U.S. Government information. Examples include Executive Order 13292, Classified National Security Information , OMB Circular A-130,63 Management of Federal Information Resources, Department of Defense Directive 5230.9 Clearance of DoD Information for Public Release, April 9, 1996, ASD (PA) and DOD Instruction 5230.29 Security and Policy Review of DoD Information for Public Release.
    - psykovsky 11y ago
      Who the fuck are you? An astroturfer for the US gov?
    - ommunist 11y ago
      I like that. Is the US law universally applied in this part of the Galaxy?
  - gwern 11y ago
    You seem to be very aggressive and politicized on this topic (why did you throw in that totally gratuitous aside about the British always being pirates?). You might want to consider your comments more carefully.
    - ommunist 11y ago
      oh I am. My mother in law spent her entire youth drawing that exact maps.
- ommunist 11y ago
  What? The USSR was one of the creators of the framework IP protection conventions. Russia is legal successor of the USSR and paid its foreign debts by the way. So what Mapstor does is plain ripping off Russian IP, since maps in question were produced after 1971. UPD: and Belarusian IP rights too. To be exact - legal department of the 5th Cartography Enterprise must file DMCA complaint agaist Mapstor and alike in such a situation. Please do not think you can violate IP property of the USSR. otherwise, your own heir will feel uneasy when such best ripping practices will be applied to them. Inherited property is still a property, isn't it?
  - gwern 11y ago
    So, then it was exactly as I said: it's either the government or the public's - not the original mapmakers like your mother-in-law. In pretty much no circumstance will the copyright on military maps ever belong to the original person who made them; such things are almost always going to be for-hire works. (Why on earth would any government or organization hire people for the extremely expensive and laborious work of making global maps and give the copyright to them?) If the governments still care, let them deal with it. It's no business of yours, nor do you need to white-knight on their behalf and throw in irrelevant arguments & gratuitious nationalist slurs.
    - ommunist 11y ago
      Looks like you know little about copyright law and how it applies. Very strange, you protect clear violators. Guys bought maps illegally, illegally exported classified material and are trading(!) classified information. Please, let me decide what is my business and what is not, thank you very much.
- PeterisP 11y ago
  Copyright of USSR-made works is not public domain; tracing the owner is tricky at times, but [obviously] works where the copyright inheritor is hard to trace are pretty much the opposite of public domain - you're not allowed to copy w/o permission, even if that permission is tricky to obtain. The "made by gov't -> public domain" is an USA-specific detail that doesn't apply in most other places. If specific people owned the copyright, then it's as usual for any other works; if a specific USSR institution owned the copyright, then the ownership will be determined by the early 1990ies transition/reorganization laws and contracts; if 'USSR' owned it, then it's owned by Russia afterwards, not public domain.
  - ommunist 11y ago
    Very true. Thank you, You saved me from explaining that to guys below in this thread.
PeterisP 11y ago
Well, copyright would protect only making new copies and redistributing them, but it definitely is legal to resell the physical maps that were made by, e.g., 5th Cartography Enterprise in 1980ies, distributed throughout USSR in rather large quantities (the access was controlled, but there were many of those maps made) and then inherited by various ex-USSR countries and enterprises. No royalty or permission is required when [re]selling existing copies of copyrighted works, copyright protects only making copies.
- ommunist 11y ago
  With exception to scales better than 1:50000 maps, I am afraid these are again classified in Russia. And there are these famous regulations applied - http://goo.gl/OF5bSn http://goo.gl/OF5bSn . Basically everything that has relief from 1:50000 is classified. However you can still have 1:20000 electronic relief of Russia from torrents, if you don't legally care.

gtirloni 11y ago

Guy’s company, Omnimap, was one of the first to import Soviet military maps to the West. Import is a huge stretch. More like stealing state secrets (and now admitting to it publicly?).

ommunist 11y ago
You are quite right.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Technically, buying them - they were 'acquired' by the mentioned map making companies. TBF said state secrets kinda fell through when the USSR fell apart.
gaius 11y ago
Can you steal from a state that doesn't even exist at the time?
- hewhowhineth 11y ago
  Not sure if this applies to the maps in question, but legal rights (and obligations) are handed down to successor country/countries. International treaties, debts and everything. Even Olympic medals I believe.
- rdtsc 11y ago
  Yes you can, states that don't exist anymore have other states that inherit both their treasures, secrets, copyrighted works as well as debts. I understand that Russia is that state in general. The issue is complicated in case of ex Soviet Republics presumably. But I would guess you also can't just storm into Mosfilm or Lenfilm (movie production studios) and start copying all their movies made during the Soviet times and selling them for profit.
PeterisP 11y ago
Umm, in pretty much every country except Russia it is completely legal to violate Russian state secrets, and in pretty much any country other than USA it's legal to violate USA state secrets. The international buyer should be completely in the clear. Furthermore, it's very likely that the seller also is completly legal - as long as it's outside of Russia but one of ex-USSR republics, their new legal systems generally don't prohibit distributing USSR state secrets, only documents that are classified by their own new authorities.

huhtenberg 11y ago

> printed in red, was the Russian word секрет. Secret. That'd be "секретно". "Cекрет" is what pirates print on their treasure maps in kindergarten :)

ak217 11y ago
Which is a nice way of saying that Greg Miller is putting on airs without running his work by a native speaker.
- rm445 11y ago
  Either that or the maps really had that word printed on them, for whatever reason.
dima55 11y ago
Hmmm? "Cекрет" is a noun. "Cекретно" is an adverb. Why is "Cекрет" inappropriate here?
- wordbank 11y ago
  "Секрет" is more a social thing. Confidential information of bigger entities like government or business will be called "тайна".
foobarian 11y ago
Weird that Russians wouldn't use a native root for such a basic concept. Plenty of Slavic languages have variations on "tajna." Maybe it's some bureaucratic term using a Westernized root to be fashionable.
- pandaman 11y ago
  In Russian Empire the imperial court mostly spoke French so lower classes, aspiring to sound more like nobles, borrowed a whole lot of French words. Because of this many Slavic words now sound archaic or pretensions to a Russian speaker. E.g. тайна in Russian is more like 'enigma', definitely not 'classified/secret'.

mashmac2 11y ago

I have a colleague who flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's, and said the Soviet civilian maps were just terrible - they'd show roads in the wrong places and didn't show secret military bases, etc. He figured this out after accidentally flying over a Soviet army base in what is today eastern Ukraine... and then talked his East German military connection into getting him a copy of the military maps.

ommunist 11y ago
As a former Soviet geodesist and forest inventory specialist, I must tell that military 1:50 000 maps are extremely accurate. What was intentionally skewed are civil 1:250 000 maps. The highest resolution and the best accuracy have been provided for so called forestry maps (1:10000).
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  Wow, that's fascinating. Would you happen to have a website somewhere that documents your experiences? I'm really curious.
  - ommunist 11y ago
    Actually I keep aset of Soviet military maps for Afghanistan. If you are interested, We can make some field experiments if you are ready to get to Bagram with Trimble GPS. It is now controlled by USAF, so you can feel certainly protected.
    - themodelplumber 11y ago
      Ah, sorry, I was more interested in your biographical experiences, not so much the topographical details. :-) It's just that I don't know many who have had a job like yours, and in USSR.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - 11y ago

cpach 11y ago

”Anyone old enough to have lived through those paranoid days of mutually assured destruction will find it a bit disturbing to see familiar hometown streets and landmarks labeled in Cyrillic script.” I was only a child during the Cold War, but yes, a few years ago when I saw one of these Soviet maps of the Swedish Tiveden forest, it felt quite strange. The quality of the map was indeed magnificent.

n0us 11y ago

I often struggle to find even the most basic information in online maps. Worse, when I am in a rural area and have no service I find no service at all. I've thought recently about keeping some paper maps in my car for such occasions, might have to look into getting copies of some of these.

aw3c2 11y ago
Get OSMAnd.
xnbya 11y ago
In the UK on bing maps you can view the OS maps, they are probably the most detailed online maps.
- david-given 11y ago
  There aren't many things which the British do really, really well, but the Ordnance Survey is one of them. Bing have a license, but it's geolocked so non-UK people don't see the OS maps. streetmap.co.uk is where I go; the actual website is terrible but they have the OS maps in 1:25000 and 1:50000 (and some of the non-topographic smaller scale maps): http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=191074&y=840453&z=0&sv=iv54+8uf&st=2&pc=iv54+8uf&mapp=map.srf&searchp=ids.srf http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=191074&y=840453&z=0&sv=iv54... Bear in mind that that map is suppose to be 4cm to a kilometre. On my screen it's about three times too big. After growing up with these maps (we were even taught how to read them at school!), visiting other countries and having to struggle with tourist maps is deeply painful.

olzhas 11y ago

Why people don't use USSR instead of Russia? or Soviet Russia?

temo4ka 11y ago

Off topic: is anyone else annoyed by those background-fixed image sections? Because the height of the section is bigger than the height of the viewport while scrolling past those sections it appears for a moment that the page stopped responding; the effect is especially prominent on wide screens.