Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers

It’s easy now, in an age when anybody can whip out a smartphone and call up a street map or high-res satellite image of any point on Earth with a few taps, to forget how hard it once was to come by geospatial knowledge.

In post-war Russia, men died in the pursuit of better maps. After World War II, Stalin ordered a complete survey of the Soviet Union. Though aerial photography had reduced the need for fieldwork by then, it didn’t eliminate it entirely, according to the 2002 paper by Alexey Postnikov, the Russian cartographer. Survey teams endured brutal conditions as they traversed Siberian wilderness and rugged mountains to establish networks of control points.

The program involved tens of thousands of surveyors and topographers, and hundreds of cartographers.

A surveyor himself, Postnikov writes that on a survey expedition to remote southern Yakutiya in the 1960s he found a grim note scrawled on a tree trunk by one of his predecessors. It’s dated November 20, 1948. “All my reindeer have perished,” it begins. “The food stores became bears’ prey. I am left with a very sick junior surveyor on my hands. I have no transportation or means of subsistence.” The stranded surveyor says he will attempt to force his way to the River Gynym, a sparsely populated area at least 200 kilometers away. Given that temperatures in Yakutiya rarely rise above –4 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, Postnikov doubts they made it.

It was after the death of Stalin in 1953 that the Soviet military, which had to that point focused its cartographic efforts on Soviet territory and nearby regions like the Balkans and Eastern Europe, started to take on global ambitions.

Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, saw fertile ground for the spread of communism in a world in which former European colonies were quickly gaining their independence, says Nick Baron, a historian at the University of Nottingham. “Khrushchev was exhilarated by the prospect of winning over these newly liberated countries in Africa, South Asia, and so on,” Baron says. “It was around that time that the military first began to undertake foreign mapping, including sending their own cartographers abroad to conduct their own surveys in many of these developing countries.”

Postnikov estimates that the military mapping program involved tens of thousands of surveyors and topographers, the people who go out into the field and gather data on relief and other features, and hundreds of cartographers who compiled these data to make the maps. During the Cold War he served in a parallel civilian cartographic corps that made maps for engineers and planners. These maps were far better than the bogus ones produced for the proletariat, accurate enough to be used for building roads and other infrastructure, but stripped of any strategic details that could aid the enemy if they were captured. The civilian cartographers were well aware that the military was busily mapping foreign territories, Postnikov says. “We knew each other personally, and we knew about their main task.”

How many maps did the military cartographers make? “Millions and millions,” is what Postnikov says when I ask, but he quickly adds: “It’s absolutely impossible to say, for me, at least.”

For San Diego, the Russians included sites of military interest, but also notes on transit, communications, and the height of buildings.

The US military made maps during the Cold War too, of course, but the two superpowers had different mapping strategies that reflected their different military strengths, says Geoff Forbes, who served in the US Army as a Russian voice interceptor during the Cold War and is now director of mapping at Land Info, a Colorado company that stocks Soviet military maps. “The US military’s air superiority made mapping at medium scales adequate for most areas of the globe,” Forbes says. As a result, he says, the US military rarely made maps more detailed than 1:250,000, and generally only did so for areas of special strategic interest. “The Soviets, on the other hand, were the global leaders in tank technology,” Forbes says. After suffering horrific losses during the Nazi ground invasion in WWII, the Soviets had built up the world’s most powerful army. Maneuvering that army required large-scale maps, and lots of them, to cover smaller areas in more detail. “One to 50,000 scale is globally considered among the military to be the tactical scale for ground forces,” Forbes says. “These maps were created so that if and when the Soviet military was on the ground in any given place, they would have the info they needed to get from point A to point B.”

A manual produced by the Russian Army, translated and published in 2005 by East View, a Minnesota company with a large inventory of Soviet maps, gives some insight into how the topographic maps could be used in planning or executing combat operations. It includes tables on the range of audibility of various sounds (a snapping twig can be heard up to 80 meters away; troop movements on foot, up to 300 meters on a dirt road or 600 meters on a highway; an idling tank, up to 1,000 meters; a rifle shot, up to 4,000 meters).

Other tables give the distances for visual objects (a lit cigarette can be visible up to 8,000 meters away at night, but you’d have to get within 100 meters to make out details of a soldier’s weaponry in daylight). Still more tables estimate the speed at which troops can move depending on the slope of the terrain, the width and condition of the roadway, and whether they are on foot, in trucks, or in tanks.

The maps themselves include copious text with detailed descriptions of the area they depict, everything from the materials and conditions of the roads to the diameter and spacing of the trees in a forest to the typical weather at different times of year. The map for Altan Emel, a remote region of China near the border of Mongolia and Russia, includes these details, according to a translation on Omnimap’s website:

The lakes are usually not large; 0.5-2 km2 (maximum up to 7 km2), with the depth up to 1 meter. The banks are low, gentle, and partially swamped. The bottom is slimy and vicious [sic]. Some of lakes have salted or alkaline water.

It goes on (and on) from there.

The description of San Diego, translated and published in English here for the first time, points out objects of obvious strategic interest—including a submarine base, a naval airbase, ammunition depots, factories that make aircraft and weapons—but also includes notes on public transportation, communications systems, and the height and architecture of buildings in various parts of town.

To make these maps of foreign territory, the Soviets started with official, publicly available maps from sources like the Ordnance Survey or the US Geological Survey. John Davies has found, for example, that elevation markers on maps of Britain often appear at exactly the same points and work out to be exact metric equivalents of the British units. (Because of such similarities, the Ordnance Survey has long maintained that the Soviet maps violate their copyright.)

The Soviets appear to have done the same thing with maps made by the US Geological Survey, but those maps are in the public domain, and anyone—including someone from the Soviet embassy—could have bought them easily.