Re: Soviet Military Maps Pro 25
Amabella Tevebaugh
The best available source of information is The Red Atlas, by John Davies and Dr Alexander J. Kent, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. (click image left for details) Those interested in the maps' historical and geopolitical context are urged to read the book, which also provides extensive descriptions of how and why the maps were made, with copious illustrations.
This website supports the book by providing useful details, examples and listings.
The cartographic production produced by the USSR during the Cold War period is immense, encompassing all corners of the globe. These topographic maps have a quality and a detail that surprises, especially as some of them are so remote and difficult to access for the technology of the time. Today, we can find countries where the best cartographic base is even Soviet maps.
In the past, offered a free-of-charge download of Soviet military topographic maps of many areas in the world. Those maps are in the public domain. Now, this site redirects to , a website offering a low-cost archived download of those maps, but not free-of-charge. allows for interactive looking at Soviet military maps, but only for parts of the world and only up to a scale of 1:100.000, even for areas mapped at 1:50.000.
Many thanks for the useful links to old Russian maps.I like these maps a lot and have been collectingthem for quite awhile. I have been recently uploading my own personal raster map collection onto the internet for others to view.
Please feel free to share, link or even embed the following online maps onto your website embedding html code can be found under the map when viewing on the Gigapan.com site. The Gigapan iPad App is also a pretty good viewer. My complete Gigapan map collection is still being updated and current status be reviewed here:
Given the technology of the time, the Soviet maps are incredibly accurate. Even today, the US State Department uses them (among other sources) to place international boundary lines on official government maps.
University libraries at places like Stanford, Oxford, and the University of Texas in Austin have drawers stuffed with Cold War Soviet maps, acquired from Guy and other dealers, but the maps have languished in obscurity. Very few academics have seen them, let alone studied them. Whatever stories they have to tell are hidden in plain sight.
It was on a consulting trip to Latvia in the early 2000s that he stumbled on a trove of Soviet maps in a shop near the center of the capital city, Riga. Davies struck up a friendship with one of the owners, a tall, athletic man named Aivars Beldavs, and bought an armload of Soviet maps from him every time he was in town.
While the newly available Soviet military maps had practical value for people inside the former republics, for Davies they brought back a bit of Cold War chill. 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. The maps are a rare glimpse into the military machine on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
They had mapped nearly the entire world at three scales. The most detailed of these three sets of maps, at a scale of 1:200,000, consisted of regional maps. A single sheet might cover the New York metropolitan area, for example.
In 2004 he presented some of his research at a meeting of the Charles Close Society, a group devoted to the study of Ordnance Survey maps. Davies was in the audience. The two men spoke, and Watt encouraged Davies to study them more seriously.
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.
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).
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.)
Economic rather than military objectives may have motivated the Soviets to map these cities in detail, suggests Steven Seegel, an expert on Russian political and intellectual history at the University of Northern Colorado. The Soviets admired US postwar economic prosperity and wanted to understand how it worked, Seegel says.
Even so, military maps are still a touchy topic in Russia. As recently as 2012, a former military topographic officer was sentenced to 12 years in prison for allegedly leaking classified maps to the West.
John Davies and Alex Kent gave a presentation of their research at an international cartography meeting in Moscow in 2011, hoping to meet Russian cartographers or scholars who knew about the maps or perhaps had even worked on them. They thought maybe someone might come up after their talk or approach them at happy hour. No one did.
The IU collection of these (mostly) former Soviet Red Army topographic maps came to us from the duplicate map room of the Library of Congress Map Collection. While by no means complete, this collection is a fine addition to our existing international map holdings. These maps have a great story to tell: some carry the stamp from both the University of Berlin and the University of Bonn Geography Departments, some are stamped "Captured Map", some carry the ID of the CIA Map Library or the Bureau of Geographic Names, and still others are hand-annotated. They are in a variety of conditions (paper, laminated, photographically reproduced in color or black and white, plasticized, or muslin-backed). The collection ranges from around 1880-1945. You can read more about the collection in the National Geographic article, "See the Classified Russian Maps That Fell Into Enemy Hands".
The maps are indexed in a similar fashion to those of the International Map of the World Series, which means that they are indexed latitudinally beginning with the letter A at the equator and proceeding north at 4 degree increments to the letter Z at the north pole, and longitudinally beginning with the number 1 at the 180th meridian and proceeding east around the world at 6 degree increments until the number 60, which is the 180th meridian.
We have the German counterparts to these maps produced during WWII as well. They share much of the same information and are indexed in the same fashion. These, however, are not organized at the moment.
Indexed and available for download by the public, these maps may be accessed through the Russian Military Topographic Map index. You can also browse these maps through Indiana University's Image Collections Online.
Before our interactive map was finished, we made do by adapting paper indexes for the web. The original index maps were scanned copies of copies, and were extremely difficult to use (see example below).
I have some Soviet era maps of my country that are very detailed. I have access to a plotter and would like to make a hard copy for my hiking trips but have issues getting the resolution/map scale to fit just right.
In the early 1990s , IU acquired a sizable collection of Russian/Soviet Military topographic maps from the duplicate map room of the Library of Congress Map Collection. A grant to IU Libraries from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has resulted in significantly expanded access to the collection for potential users across the globe.
National Geographic has featured the project on its website (see: Soviet-russia-maps-captured-world-war-II) and in May, 2019, the Indiana Geographic Information Council ecognized it with an Excellence in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) award for outstanding achievement in incorporating GIS technology.
The Map and Government Information Library holds Soviet military topographic map sets for most countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. These paper sets are in Russian with a scale of 1:200,000.
Russian military mapping: a guide to using the most comprehensive source of global geospatial intelligence.
Map and Government Information Library - Reference UA995 .R8 S6713 2005 (does not circulate)
Authors note:--acrosscanadatrails 13:22, 29 September 2010 (BST) I created this page to be a starting point for gathering all of the information that is known about these maps.I'm looking to create a map legend for these maps, as there is none present. However, when looking at it, it's easy to see what symbols and features are represented on the map, as cartographic standards are generic.
The following table provides links to scanned index maps where available and identifies which university holds what map sets within our California community. This is a complex and ongoing project, so feel free to contact the relevant map librarians for further information if needed.
RAND researchers analyzed which African countries received military arms and private military and security contractors from China and Russia in 2018-2021. This visualization maps China's and Russia's influence across Africa.
In addition to practical details, the maps include scores of bizarre features that possess little military value. The foot trails at Arlington National Cemetery; small pools of water in the forest along the C&O canal; even the meticulously transcribed names of suburban streets.
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