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.
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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.
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.
Most of these maps were classified, their use carefully restricted to military officers. Behind the Iron Curtain, ordinary people did not have access to accurate maps. Maps for public consumption were intentionally distorted by the government and lacked any details that might benefit an enemy should they fall into the wrong hands.
Very little is known about how the Soviet military made these maps, but it appears they used whatever information they could get their hands on. Some of it was relatively easy to come by. In the U.S., for example, they would have had access to publicly-available topographic maps made by the U.S. Geological Survey (legend has it the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. routinely sent someone over to check for new maps). To obtain more obscure information, they would have had to get creative.
Exactly how the Soviet maps came to be available in the West is a touchy subject. They were never meant to leave the motherland, and they have never been formally declassified. In 2012, a retired Russian colonel was convicted of espionage, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to 12 years in prison for smuggling maps out of the country. In researching the book, Kent and Davies had hoped to speak with some of former military cartographers who worked on the maps, but they never found anyone willing to talk.
As the Soviet Union broke up in the late 1980s, the maps began appearing in the catalogs of international map dealers. Telecommunications and oil companies were eager customers, buying up Soviet maps of central Asia, Africa, and other parts of the developing world for which no good alternatives existed. Aid groups and scientists working in remote regions often used them too.
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.
Large-scale Soviet military city plans of many British, North American, European and World cities and small / medium scale topographic maps of parts of the British Isles, North America and Europe are now available to view and reprints are available for purchase.
The city plans are at scales of 1:10 000 or 1: 25 000, whilst the topographic maps are at scales of 1:1 million, 1:500 000, 1:200 000, 1:100 000 and 1:50 000. All were produced by the Military Topographic Directorate of the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the 1990s. Specific details for each sheet are given in the links below.
You may order high-resolution colour reprints of these, printed on premium-quality 200 gsm satin-finish paper.
The reprints are approximately the same size as the original maps. The sizes vary, but City plans and Posters are typically around 900mm by 900mm, whilst topographic maps are typically around 450mm by 450mm. However, you may request smaller size print (for example by specifying percentage reduction or the maximum length of longest side) by emailing sales@redatlasbook.com when placing your order.
Price of City Plans, large-format topos and posters is 25 per sheet.
Price of Topographic maps is 20 per sheet.
Each sheet is printed on demand and supplied rolled in a stout cardboard tube.
Post and packing is charged at 10 per order, regardless of the number of sheets ordered.
We normally expect to deliver within 28 days of ordering, but this is not guaranteed. Be aware that in some cases due to the pandemic and its consequences, the postal service is currently rather slow.
All prices are in pounds sterling.
Please note that we cannot accept orders from or deliver to addresses in Russian Federation.
The maps are printed from high-resolution scans of historic paper maps and may show minor blemishes.
Please read our Terms and Conditions before ordering prints.
Please address enquries to sales@redatlasbook.com
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