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From: H-Net Staff <revh...@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
Date: Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:58 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]: Bogdan on Davies and Kent, 'The Red Atlas:
How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World'
To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
John Davies, Alexander J. Kent. The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union
Secretly Mapped the World. Chicago University Of Chicago Press,
2017. Maps. 272 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-38957-8.
Reviewed by Nina Bogdan (University of Arizona)
Published on H-War (February, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
The story of how John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, the authors of
_Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World_, gained
access to the "secret" Soviet maps showcased in their book is both
familiar and somewhat anticlimactic--as the Soviet Union
disintegrated, pieces of it went up for sale, to include cartographic
productions. The suddenness of the collapse created opportunities to
make a quick ruble (or, more likely, dollar), particularly in places
like the Baltic states, where Soviet rule was thrown off as
expeditiously as possible. Given the culture of secrecy around all
map production and cartography in the Soviet Union throughout its
history, it is no wonder that the individuals who had access to the
maps in bulk (and who coincidentally also needed money) were former
Soviet military personnel. However, as the authors describe, despite
the efforts of various parties to get their hands on them, a huge
number of maps were simply destroyed. For example, Aivars Zvirbulis,
a Latvian orienteer (orienteering is a sport that combines racing and
navigation), negotiated to buy one hundred tons of maps out of _six
thousand tons_ set for destruction as waste paper, but in the end
acquired only two or three tons as "local children" set fire to the
rest (p. 132). The fact that the painstaking work of Soviet
cartographers ended up all over the world in private hands, scholarly
institutions, and museums, then, is something to celebrate, given the
work and craft that went into creating these maps. There is no end to
the irony that Western military forces used Soviet-made maps of
Afghanistan prior to invasion in 2001. Not only were these maps
incredibly accurate but they were also the only such maps available.
The authors have compiled an atlas, which, though it provides some
interesting insights and explanations, raises a host of broader
questions: What was the purpose of creating detailed maps in the
Russian language of places with seemingly little military or
intelligence interest? Was it part of a plan to take over the world?
If so, what does this say about the supposed threat of nuclear
annihilation posed by a perennially aggressive, according to Western
discourse, Soviet state, a threat that led directly to a central
doctrine of US foreign policy during the Cold War: the concept of
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)? Why create maps of places that
theoretically would no longer exist in the event of nuclear
holocaust? Was it because the Soviet government considered a nuclear
exchange survivable? Or did the Soviet political and military
leadership remain convinced that a conventional war was possible and
thus drew up contingency plans that included "mapping the world" to
assist their reconnaissance forces? Or was the global mapping project
simply part of Soviet efforts to maintain domestic full employment?
There are no answers to these questions in the book; instead, the
authors present the maps as curious examples of the focus and
activity of a secretive repressive regime--a seemingly obsessive
attempt between 1950 and 1990 to collect detailed topographic
information literally from everywhere in the world and to create
accurate high-quality maps of those locations. The military purpose
of the mapping is clear and indubitable as the authors point out time
and again: much of the information included in the maps is militarily
oriented. Details such as navigability of rivers, carrying capacity
of bridges, and number of tracks in railroads may interest some
tourist travelers but are not details generally included in tourist
maps or even standard maps for administrative purposes.
The book is divided into four chapters and includes eight appendices,
but, at 234 pages, the text takes second place to the graphics: a
significant portion of the book is dedicated to the maps, which are
reproduced at a high level of quality. In the foreword, James Risen
notes both the beauty and craft of the maps, as well as the mystery
behind their production. And though the authors point to the age of
the maps reproduced to account for problems of quality, the aesthetic
aspect of Soviet cartography is evident throughout this book--the
maps are beautiful, intricate, and detailed with, as Risen notes, "an
artisanal quality" (p. xi). In chapter 1, titled perhaps with tongue
somewhat in cheek as "War and Peace," the authors provide brief (and
therefore extremely limited in terms of context) background
information on the history of Russian imperial as well as Soviet
mapping. The cartographic craft in Russia was well developed before
the Soviet period as "the vast extent of continental Russia ... led
to the emergence of arguably the most talented pool" of experts in
the fields of geodesy, surveying, and cartography in the world (p.
4). In the Soviet period, for obvious reasons, the state controlled
all aspects of mapmaking, with constant revisions to specifications
and eventual complete standardization of "typefaces, colors,
symbology, and projection system" (p. 5). Using highly trained and
skilled printers, the Soviet government produced consistently
high-quality maps for military use. Any maps available outside
domestic military or intelligence use, on the contrary, were of
either famously poor quality and/or deliberately incorrect.[1]
Chapter 2 describes the nuts and bolts of Soviet mapmaking: how the
global mapping project began under Joseph Stalin's aegis, evolving
over time and continuing right up to 1990 in an elaborate
comprehensive system that guaranteed comprehensibility of Soviet-made
maps by anyone trained in that system. Training posters for Soviet
personnel, reproduced in the book, show symbology and variations of
specific features, such as railroads or hydrography. The authors
explain the symbology and discuss style and content of the maps in
this section. Interestingly, "the true extent of the Soviet
cartographic enterprise [of mapping the world] ... has yet to
emerge." Cartographers mapped the entire USSR at the scale of
1:25,000 by 1987 but they were also mapping the entire globe so it is
"impossible to quantify" the actual number of maps produced, though,
given available information, the number, according to some estimates,
is "well in excess of one million" (p. 11). Topographical and city
plan maps for both military and civil use constituted the bulk of the
maps, with a third category for special-use maps, such as for
aero-navigation purposes. The Gauss-Krüger (G-K) conformal
transverse cylindrical projection was the standard projection used in
Soviet mapping, allowing "the depiction of the globe as a flat
surface for relatively small areas" (p. 24). Though maps produced for
use by civil authorities lacked the detail of military-purpose maps,
all were classified "Secret" (p. 39).
In chapter 3, the authors delve into Soviet cartographers' methods
and highlight errors or discrepancies that assist in determining how
various maps may have actually been created (from satellite imagery,
copying UK Ordnance Survey or US Geological Service [USGS] maps, or
human observation, to name some options). The launching of the
satellite program in 1962 facilitated map production but also led to
errors, which, according to the authors, "proved" use of aerial
reconnaissance. Misreading satellite images led sometimes to
inclusion of nonexistent roads (ditches in actuality that looked like
roads from miles above). Copying outdated maps led to erroneous
inclusions, sometimes leading to later corrected versions, meaning
that perhaps human intelligence provided updated information. Soviet
maps were at times more accurate than the USGS maps: a Soviet Miami,
Florida, city map, for instance, included the latest housing
development that did not appear in "then-latest USGS map," indicating
reliance on aerial surveillance (p. 57). The authors dedicate most of
this chapter (titled "Plots and Plans") to examining US and UK maps,
devoting a substantial amount of space on errata in Soviet maps of
British road maps, for example. This section is fascinating and
indicates the amount of work the authors did to arrive at their
interpretations--comparing maps of similar dates, surmising the kinds
of information available about a particular location (a veritable
cornucopia of publicly available tourist and travel information
generally exists for "capitalist cities"), and showing why or how
such information might have been misread. Perhaps the most
interesting aspect of Soviet mapmaking was the human intelligence
factor or "boots on the ground"--for example, a Soviet military
attaché picnicking on the beach in Sweden obtained information about
secret mine fields by striking up a conversation with an excavator
driver who dug trenches for the cables to those mine fields (p. 71).
The extent and specificity of this human intelligence as a factor in
mapmaking is the most difficult to gauge, according to the authors,
with the exception of specific information, such as spacing of trees
in a forest and similar types of measurements: only a human being
could provide such specific information. Of course, this opens up an
entire range of questions about the leisure activities of Soviet
diplomatic personnel in postings abroad--while picking mushrooms in
the forest on their day off, they were apparently also counting trees
or engaged in other information collection. More questions arise as
well: Why did maps of a bridge in Miami include load-bearing capacity
while maps of San Francisco area bridges did not? Was there a reason
for such omissions or were boots on the ground unable to obtain the
information?
Finally, in chapter 4, titled "Resurrection" (yet another nod to Leo
Tolstoy?), the authors discuss the legacy of the maps in the
post-Soviet world. In 1997, Britain's Ordnance Survey sought to quash
distribution of Soviet maps as the organization claimed they
infringed on its copyright, "effectively" terminating the possibility
of anyone using the maps openly in the UK for a period of time. The
internet came to the rescue as is often the case in the modern world
and the maps "proliferated on websites" proving "hugely valuable" in
circumstances where no maps had existed (p. 133).
Appendix 1 consists of fifty-seven pages of vividly colored map
extracts; appendix 2 lists references and resources in English,
Finnish, Polish, German, Russian, and Swedish, largely reference
books and articles about cartography. Despite the fact that this is a
book about Soviet mapping, the Russian section is quite short (five
sources). The authors are both cartographers by profession--Davies a
journalist and Kent a reader at Canterbury Christ Church
University--and are clearly masters of their craft, but it might have
been worthwhile to interview someone from the intelligence community
for insight into Soviet human intelligence collection. Appendices 3
and 4 consist of translations of descriptive information of Cambridge
from maps of the location; appendix 5 lists selected symbols and
annotations; appendix 6 is a glossary of common terms and
abbreviations; appendix 7 elaborates on the print codes; and appendix
8 provides examples of forms Soviet military personnel had to fill
out simply to access a map form the worldwide mapping project.
The title of the book is a bit misleading since the overwhelming
majority of maps included in the book are of Europe, North America,
and the Soviet Union itself. Included are one each maps of Beijing,
Tokyo, Afghanistan, Istanbul and the area of Jordan, Israel, and
Syria but no maps whatsoever of Latin America, Africa, or most of
Asia. Therefore, from the materials highlighted in this particular
book, it is not possible to determine whether the Soviet government
produced such detailed maps of the southern hemisphere. According to
the authors, however, 2,000 cities outside of Russia were mapped
worldwide with only 220 of those in the US and UK (p. 31). And, in
appendix 2, the authors do provide links and physical locations where
Soviet-made maps may be viewed or purchased for those who may have an
interest in the rest of the world.
The fact that the focus of this book is specifically on
Russian-language maps draws attention to some lack of clarity in
explanations of Russian transliteration and translation from Russian.
It is a standard grammatical convention in Russian to hyphenate
foreign multiple-word place-names (San Francisco is
Сан-Франциско, for example). It is therefore logical that
Soviet cartographers would include hyphens in the Russian versions of
multiple-word foreign place-names on their maps. The authors,
however, note the convention as if it is an interesting anomaly or
peculiar to Soviet mapmaking rather than a standard Russian-language
rule. With respect to translation, in appendices 3 and 4, the authors
provide, as an example, translations of the descriptive information
of Cambridge from Soviet maps under the Russian title of a "spravka"
(справка). "Spravka" is a context-driven word, which means a
variety of things depending on how it is used: it can mean anything
from "certificate" to "fact sheet" to "summary." In the case of the
document in the appendix, the correct translation would be
"descriptive statement" or even "descriptive information," not simply
"information" as rendered. A correct translation of a term generally
makes it unnecessary to include the transliterated term in the
finished translation but the reoccurrence of "spravka" throughout the
book indicates some uncertainty on the part of the authors as to its
meaning. Within the book, on two occasions (pp. 30, 38), they refer
to this "spravka" as a descriptive essay or description, but in a
third reference they revert to explaining the content of the
"spravka" to define its meaning (p. 128). In addition, in the caption
to a graphic on page 31, "spravka" is in parentheses after "index,"
implying that they are one and the same, but in the text accompanying
the graphic, street index and "spravka" are not interchangeable,
indicating there is some confusion as to the meaning of the word in
this context. In general, the translations of cartographic text the
authors use are literal and therefore somewhat awkward, even taking
into account difference in British and American English; a "city
plan" (p. 30) in most cases is a "city map"; a "plan-scheme" (p. 42)
of a town is probably its "layout"; and an "important object" (p. 38)
is more likely a "critical facility." Further, in a listing of Soviet
research vessels, the authors quote from a British Ministry of
Defense memorandum, which lists a "Mikhael Lomondsov" (p. 127). It is
unclear whether this is an error in the original document or a typo
in the book. Mikhail Lomonosov, for whom the ship was named, was not
only a renowned eighteenth-century Russian scientist but also a
seminal contributor to the development of the modern Russian literary
language, so misspelling his name is doubly lamentable. A curious
omission occurs in a segment where the authors provide translations
of text from Soviet maps (p. 49). In the bottom graphic, the Russian
text includes the abbreviation РКЧ (RKCh), which is simply
rendered as is in the English translation. What does it mean? A
cursory internet search indicates that НРКЧ stands for
"научно-редакционная
картосоставительская часть" or "Map
compilation research and editorial unit." Does the abbreviation in
the graphic stand for a similar such organization? Leaving the
abbreviation or acronym as is without any explanatory note leaves its
meaning open to speculation and is a strange oversight in a book with
such otherwise acute attention to detail.
The importance of language and cultural interpretation are integral
aspects of this story. The authors note several instances of
incorrect renderings of British place-names by Soviet mapmakers or
confusion as to meanings of words: Harvey Court, for example, the
name of a building that is part of a college, is identified as a
courthouse ("суд" in Russian) (p. 85). Such a basic error seems
odd given the loving attention to detail by Soviet mapmakers, but it
is a reminder that the person who actually produced the map had
likely never been to Cambridge and, given the overwhelmingly "need to
know" environment in the Soviet Union, may not have had access to any
cultural information about the UK to assist in making translation or
labeling decisions. Cold War paranoia, however, is not limited to the
Soviet side: the authors make the somewhat histrionic assertion in
the beginning of chapter 1 that it is "chilling" to see "the
landscape of our childhood presented in ... an alien language" (p.
3). "Alien" in this context reinforces the idea of the "otherness" of
the Russian language and therefore of Russians, with an implication
that the language, and consequently the culture, is both threatening
and even inferior. And the use of the word "chilling" implies that
the mere rendering of conventionally Latin-alphabet place-names in
the Cyrillic alphabet is an act of aggression. This statement
thankfully stands alone with respect to tone as the overall
discussion in the book about the scientific, practical, aesthetic,
and politico-historical aspects of the maps does not include undue
inflammatory rhetoric. Granted, the maps explored here were certainly
produced for military purposes but even in tourist maps produced in
other countries, the text is generally in the native language of
those countries. After all, American-made maps of Russia, produced
for use by the US military, or by civilians for that matter, are not
written in the Cyrillic alphabet, are they? Should Russian people
feel discomfort or paranoia about the fact that Americans write
"Санкт-Петербург" as "Sankt-Peterburg" or, worse yet,
St. Petersburg?
Cartography enthusiasts will certainly be interested in this book if
only for the gorgeous reproductions. Scholars specializing in the
study of the Soviet Union or Soviet-American relations, whether
historians or political scientists, as well as military historians,
will also find this book a nice addition to their libraries as the
authors do provide a substantial amount of cartographic information
useful for further study and very digestible details in light of the
hands-on examples provided. On a theoretical level, this book is a
fascinating example of some of the seminal themes of scholars who
write about the power, secrecy, and meanings of maps beyond the
graphics on the physical page. Instead of the wages of sin, East
Germany, for example, paid the wages of secrecy, as the inaccurate
maps the GDR government had enthusiastically produced and
proliferated were completely useless in post-unification
Germany--construction companies had to resort to using pre-World War
II maps (p. 139). Therefore, this would be a wonderful text to
accompany J. B. Harley's _The New Nature of Maps_ (2001) or Mark
Monmonier's _How to Lie with Maps_ (1991) in an undergraduate class
on the history of cartography and the nation-state.
Note
Citation: Nina Bogdan. Review of Davies, John; Kent, Alexander J.,
_The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World_.
H-War, H-Net Reviews. February, 2018.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51095
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
--
--
Best regards,
Andrew Stewart
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