John Davies - The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World

By James Risen

Nearly three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cold War secrets are still tumbling out.

Some of them are beautiful.

An enormous and secret infrastructure supported the intelligence battles that were waged between the East and West throughout the forty-year Cold War standoff. The United States and the Soviet Union and their allies spied on each other incessantly, because they wanted to be prepared just in case an unthinkable war ever broke out.

Spying involves waiting, watching, remembering, and recording. It involves sophisticated cameras and high-altitude aircraft and missiles with satellitesbut also people on the ground, quietly walking down streets, looking.

Sometimes, the products of all that spying during the Cold War were intelligence reports, which told Washington or London or Moscow what the other side was doing. Intelligence reports might provide inside information that could be used to decide broad strategywhen to move armies and navies.

Sometimes, the products were maps. Highly detailed maps, useful for spies and policy makers, for diplomats, invading armies, and occupiers. Maps that could provide more specific tactical information than might come from intelligence reports. Maps that could tell a general which roads and bridges provided the best routes to use to drive his tanks, or an admiral which harbors were deep enough for his destroyers.

When the Cold War ended, the secret infrastructure built up by the superpowers was left behind. Today much of it has been rediscovered and repurposed; missile silos in the American Midwest, for example, are being turned into eclectic prairie homes.

Now, with the publication of The Red Atlas, we discover another aspect of that long-secret infrastructureSoviet military maps, including maps of Moscows great adversaries, the United States and Britain.

Once classified, the maps displayed here give an eerie reminder of an obvious, yet still unsettling fact, at least for American and British readers. They show that the Russians were watching America and Britain, just as much as the Americans and British were watching them. They were looking down from above, and looking from the street. The Russians didnt miss much.

Americans have long taken for granted the fact that the United States had spy planes and spy satellites flying over the Soviet Union. But these maps remind us that the Soviets had spy satellites flying over the United States too, staring through the clouds at America as it changed and grew throughout the Cold War. In fact, Russian mapmakers worked hard to keep up with the transforming landscapes of the United States and Great Britainthe construction of interstate highways and shopping centers and new suburbs and new military bases posed endless challenges for the Russians. Yet the maps show that they were sometimes faster to incorporate new landmarks than were their Western counterparts.

Whats more, the Russian maps sometimes included sensitive information about secret locations in the United States and Britain that had been excluded from public Western maps.

But the Russian maps include details that could not have come from satellites alone. They incorporate the names of factories and what was made in those factories. The kind of products manufactured inside a factory cant be divined from overhead imagery, so did the purpose of the factories become clear only when a Soviet agent walked down the street? Or did the Russians have other information? Were there moles in the U.S. and British governments passing them data? The questions remain unanswered.

These Soviet maps, which were produced as part of the worlds largest mapping effort, present an alternative view of the globe. They tell us what the Russians saw when they looked at us. What the Russian mapmakers considered important enough to detail in their maps reveals to us what the Russians thought was most important in the United States and Britain.

These maps were the product of an ambitious effort by Moscow to accurately and secretly map the Soviet Union, its Eastern European allies, its Western adversariesand the rest of the world. Conducted by the Military Topographic Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Army, the worldwide mapping effort may have produced more than a million different maps of different parts of the globe.

The Russian maps were also of extraordinarily high quality. Soviet-era military maps were so good that when the United States first invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, American pilots relied on old Russian maps of Afghanistan. For almost a month after the United States began a bombing campaign to help oust the Taliban government, American pilots were guided by Russian maps dating back to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The U.S. intelligence community had been too slow in figuring out how to process and distribute up-to-date satellite photographs of Afghanistan.

These Russian military maps are detailed and honest, even in their careful depictions of the Soviet Union itself. Thats ironic, since Russian-made maps of the Soviet Union that were made available to the public during the Cold War were purposefully terrible and misleading. A product of Stalinist paranoia of foreign invaders, the maps of the Soviet Union made for the public and tourists included flaws and mistakes designed to hide information or deflect travelers.

But the Russian military maps are also something elselong-lost works of art. The craftsmanship and the sheer beauty of the maps make them mesmerizing. The use of colors, lines, and geometric shapes lends them an art deco feel.