Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, its legacy and the
accompanying Russian-American tension continues to loom large. Russia's
access to detailed information on the United States and its allies may
not seem so shocking in this day of data clouds and leaks, but long
before we had satellite imagery of any neighborhood at a finger's reach,
the amount the Soviet government knew about your family's city, street,
and even your home would astonish you. Revealing how this was possible,
The Red Atlas is the never-before-told story of the most comprehensive
mapping endeavor in history and the surprising maps that resulted.
From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic
mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that
included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of
military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, and London to towns
like Pontiac, MI and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough
information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on
these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories and ports, or
more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, and bridge
capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology,
while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels
around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet
feet on the ground. The Red Atlas includes over 350 extracts from
these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and
cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their
makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.
A fantastic historical document of an era that sometimes seems less
distant, The Red Atlas offers an uncanny view of the world through the
eyes of Soviet strategists and spies.
