front cover of The Red Atlas
The Red Atlas
How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World
John Davies and Alexander J. Kent
University of Chicago Press, 2017
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A fantastic historical document of an era that sometimes seems less distant, The Red Atlas offers an uncanny view of the world through the eyes of Soviet strategists and spies.
 
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front cover of Soviet Intelligence Plans for the British Isles
Soviet Intelligence Plans for the British Isles
John M. Davies and Alexander J. Kent
Bodleian Library Publishing
During the Cold War, the Soviet military embarked on a massive project to map every corner of the globe. As part of this project, many cities and towns in the British Isles were mapped in astonishing detail and with great accuracy, providing the Soviet Union with strategic intelligence on key British and Irish locations. These were not simply copies of existing local maps, but included considerable original research. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, news of the previously secret maps began to emerge, though little is still known about why they were made or how the information was gathered.
 
Drawing on an archive acquired by the Bodleian Library, John M. Davies and Alexander J. Kent examine the maps of more than thirty British and Irish towns, including, among many others, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Swansea, and Sheffield. They look at some of the notable inaccuracies and highlight the surprising wealth of information the maps contain, including bridge heights, river depths, street names, and every strategic installation of possible significance. In addition, their expert commentary offers suggestions about what the maps may reveal about the sources of the data.
 
A fascinating collection of documents concerning Cold War military intelligence, Soviet Intelligence Plans for the British Isles represents an intriguing exploration of how information was compiled during a period of deep mutual suspicion between the Soviet Union and the West.
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