The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent

A fascinating aspect of maps is their potential to unlock past secrets of espionage activities by one country against another. Beginning with World War II and extending throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union undertook a secret military campaign to map much of the world, including the United States and Great Britain. Outsiders have discovered these maps only recently, surfacing in the collections of map collectors and dealers following acquisition from military depots in former Soviet republics after the fall of the USSR. These large-scale Soviet maps include an astonishing amount of information, such as maps of American cities dotted with infrastructure features annotated with details about bridges and their weight load capacity, for example, and factories that denote the types of products manufactured at each. A perusal of these maps stimulates many intriguing questions. Were these maps created to support a planned Soviet invasion of the West? How were the Soviets able to keep their global mapping program a secret for so long? In The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World, John Davies and Alexander Kent provide an exquisite presentation and analysis of several of these mysterious maps and posit likely explanations for why and how they were constructed by the Soviets during the Cold War.

According to the authors, the Soviet maps represent "the most comprehensive global topographic mapping project ever undertaken" (11); the entire collection may exceed over one million total maps. Central to the atlas are visual reproductions for portions of many of these Soviet maps, along with accompanying explanatory text. Davies and Kent divide these maps into three main categories: topographic maps, city plans, and special maps. Topographic maps were created for both military and civil purposes, tiled by a regular grid and range in scale from 1:10,000 to 1:1,000,000. City plans are maps for individual cities, many at 1:25,000 scale, which include a "spravka," or descriptions of important features in the city. Special maps include other map series such as small-scale topographic maps, large-scale town plans, and aeronavigation maps.

The atlas is organized into four chapters and eight appendices. Chapter 1 provides a brief history of Soviet mapping, focusing on the detailed maps compiled by the Military Topographic Depot that started during the Tsarist period and continued under the communist regimes of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 describes the major types of Soviet maps (topographic maps, city plans, and special maps) through a systematic analysis of the content, symbology, medium, scale, map projection, and other cartographic elements. Chapter 3 considers how the Soviet maps were compiled and describes the various sources that were used during the map compilation process, including existing topographic maps from the US Geological Survey and the British Ordnance Survey, as well as imagery from Soviet satellites. In addition to these sources, Davies and Kent demonstrate how these sources alone would not have been sufficient to capture all the details displayed on the maps and provide indisputable evidence that human intelligence acquired in the field was necessary to complete many of the maps. Chapter 3 also includes several comparisons between Soviet maps and their US Geological Survey or British Ordnance Survey counterparts, with interesting discrepancies between the maps highlighted. Chapter 4 traces the fascinating discovery of the Soviet maps by the rest of the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The appendices include reproductions from subsets of over fifty maps along with explanatory materials such as legends and place-name descriptions that allow the reader ample opportunities to ponder the mysteries of these maps themselves.

Davies and Kent have assembled a masterful book that recounts the story of a mammoth national mapping program that surely will be considered one of the great cartographic feats of the twentieth century. The Red Atlas is a captivating read from cover to cover, and, in the words of the authors, reads like a "detective story" (1) as the mysteries of the Soviet maps are unveiled through meticulous analysis and a good balance of written prose and high-quality map images. The atlas will appeal to wide audiences, including twentieth-century historians, cartographers, historical geographers, political geographers, map enthusiasts, and the casual reader interested in a stealthy story with maps at the centerpiece. Readers may feel a chill up the spine as they see Cyrillic writing superimposed on maps of American and British cities while contemplating the intended uses of these maps by the Soviets. The Red Atlas will undoubtedly assume its place as an important piece of scholarship in the history of modern cartography, while also prompting readers to wonder about the capabilities of modern mapping technologies used today by countries to spy on each other. Although plenty rich in informative content, the atlas is also a captivating read because of the unanswered questions it leaves with the reader due to the fact that the authors admit that they "don't know what they don't know" (1) as the story of the Soviet maps continues to unfold. Hopefully, this sets the stage for a sequel to the saga as more maps are discovered in the future.