The Red Atlas
- Lipmann Walton & Co Ltd
- May 28
- 7 min read
Tales from the Map War
The Red Atlas (2017),
Published by The University of Chicago Press Ltd., London
By John Davies and Alexander J Kent
When amateur pilot Mathias Rust landed his single propeller Cessna on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge close to Red Square in May 1987, not even Russia’s enemies believed the Soviet experiment was terminal. Red faces, yes, but final curtain for the Red Army? Surely not.
Two years later, in 1989, as long established Soviet and satellite countries, to the strains of Ode to Joy, emerged blinking into the bright camera lights of freedom, no one had a plan. Physical maps, as this book shows, were many. Of political plans, there were none.
As well as old fashioned boots on the ground, what the Soviets did have was a great many extraordinarily detailed and practical maps composed using aerial and satellite reconnaissance.
Some of these may now be studied in a remarkable book titled The Red Atlas written and compiled by John Davies and Alexander J Kent and sub-titled, ‘How the Soviet Union secretly mapped the world’. Part of the faintly chilling joy in being able to inspect them now in the comfort of our living rooms is to see familiar places in Britain not as we see them – but as seen by those who spied on us.
The glorious source material comes from the programme of map-making first commissioned by Stalin during the Second World War. Carried out by the Military Topographic Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Army, it is thought they produced over a million maps. As can be seen from the detail, these maps were created to be used for military conquest. The Soviet map makers were nothing if not ambitious. Few countries or details were omitted.
One of the delights of the book is the authors’ examples of Soviet records of British places kept secret from UK citizens. A good example is a map of The Royal Air Force Pembroke Dock [from the early 1930s to the late 1950s the successor to the 1814-1926 Royal Navy Dockyard on the same site]. The Soviet plan of 1950 details the ‘dockyard, pier, railways, and barracks’; the barracks with a star-shaped perimeter. All were omitted by an Ordnance Survey of the same year. It was an RAF flying boat base. The last time the area had been mapped for UK eyes was in 1869.
Another example of Ordnance Survey omission, revealed by The Guardian in 2006, was that of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield, near Reading, which was the site of UKs Trident Nuclear Warheads programme. Now that it has been decommissioned, it is easily viewed today on Google Earth. But in the 1950s when Cold War fears were at their height, peace campaigners were hounded and arrested for seeking such information. By 1982, when the Burghfield base was still a working establishment, the Soviet map contained details of the buildings.
The authors of The Red Atlas point out that, in contrast, the OS omission of the 11 UK regional bunkers planned for the continuation of government in the event of nuclear war were denied from Soviet spying eyes as they could not be viewed from the air. Their subterranean location meant they were kept secret from the UK populace too, much to the chagrin of disarmament campaigners whose view was that the bunkers proved the UK government was planning for nuclear war.
Other details that appeared on Soviet maps prove that actual spies were as important in the process of information gathering as detail acquired from the air. Load-bearing weights of bridges, distances between trees in forests, clearance under bridges, speed, flows and depths of rivers. All would have been important in the event of an invasion.
An example where detail had the potential to go awry for the Soviets is demonstrated when towns, such as Gloucester and Leicester, with etymologically quirky spellings, are transliterated into Russian as ‘Gloster’ and ‘Lester’, making – as the authors point out – the reading of road signs in the event of invasion somewhat difficult. Similarly, the town of Wymondham, one of many Norfolk villages not pronounced as written, is rendered phonetically in Cyrillic as Yиндем (Windem).
Tiny and inconsequential errors make the book an endearing human record. Almost in a compliment to Harry Beck’s 1931 diagrammatic map of the Underground, the Soviet map places the stations topologically. In the Soviet version, Pimlico (misspelt as ‘Timlico’) has swapped places on the Thames with ‘Vauxhall’ - perhaps in a nod to the very social engineering the Soviet Union was all about.
Soviet military map makers also recorded details about the topography of their own country not permitted to non-military citizens. The State was riddled with ‘closed cities’ left blank on maps. Military facilities and manufacturing and research related to the defence industrial base were located there, and the cities became scientific ghettoes where metallurgists and nuclear physicists were given superior living conditions in return for their dedication towards Soviet defence goals.
One such closed factory I visited in the early 2000s, in my day job hunting for metals for Western industry, was the ‘Chepetsky Mechanical Works’ in Glasov, Udmurtia. This was a place that had precious little to do with mechanics, but in fact produced nuclear-grade zirconium, hafnium and calcium for the Soviet nuclear power and weapons programme. Soviet subterfuge of using names as decoys appears to have been based on the assumption our Government would have been doing the same.
Part of the pleasure of the book is derived from looking at the familiar through imperfect spy craft eyes. For example, Polish map makers in 1957, under guidance from Moscow, chose to record place names phonetically – making Southend-on-Sea the more Essex-sounding Saufend-on-Sji, while Eastbourne, Bexhill and Hastings become the rather exotic Istbon, Bekshyl and Hejstynz.
The idea of maps to give comfort to the traveller, the sort some of us procured from Stamfords on Long Acre before we back-packed to India (in my case in the 1970s), is inverted to maps to subvert, re-order and, in the case of foreign countries and potential adversaries, provide an A-Z for annexation. It was all precise preparation for what Soviet hubris regarded as the inevitable triumph of communist socialism over our decadent Western capitalism – and today has the power to send shivers down the spine at the prospect of what is being prepared for us now.
Perhaps we can comfort ourselves that these maps conferred a sense of power to the Soviet leadership that in the event proved illusory. The sad final measure of their worth came in the aftermath of the collapse when they became nothing more than Cold War booty – lumps of paper measured by the ton to be traded for food or hard currency. In that period of collapse, you had to have a long view to realise their value - which, fortunately some enlightened parties did. The book contains this account of a transaction involving $250,000 in cash:
The year was 1989. The Soviet Union was falling apart, and some of its military officers were busy selling off the pieces. By the time Guy arrived at the Helipad, most of the goods had already been off-loaded from the chopper and spirited away. The crates he’d come for were all that was left. As he prised the lid off one to inspect the goods, he got a powerful whiff of pine. It was a box inside a box, and the space between was packed with juniper needles. Guy figured the guys who packed it were used to handling cargo that had to get past drug-sniffing dogs, but it wasn’t drugs he was there for. Inside the crates were maps, thousands of them.
Today, as the world enters rougher waters, people can be forgiven for nostalgically wishing the Cold War with its certainties would return. Looking back, we can glimpse an apparent Boy’s Own spying game, overlaid with subterfuge and artistry in the map war. Made with craftsmanship and precision and no longer a threat, they may be viewed as works of art that employed the skills of design, colour co-ordination and symbology to great effect. It is spy-craft of a different era.
What has changed in the world is that what once took thousands of man-hours to compile may now be seen in seconds via Google Maps and other satellite technology. Today’s febrile world concentrates less on topography than cyber mapping the enemy’s electronic systems. If it’s damage that’s wanted, so much can be achieved without any of the aids once thought indispensable. As a pathetic, sad, and senseless example of modern disruption, we may cite the cyber-attack of 2023 on The British Library thought to be by the Russian origin Rhysida ransomeware gang. Now, more than two years later, the Library is still not fully back online. Mapping underwater cables or geological structures from space is where today’s effort is going, and the skills required are not those of the old-fashioned mapper. Ships merely dragging their anchors across the arteries of modern life is enough to cause chaos.
In 1989, when I first travelled along vast, straight roads, of at least four tank-widths from Helsinki to Leningrad (as St Petersburg was called at the time), there was no available map, no road signs, petrol stations, or café stops. But nor was there any need. Maps are only required if you have a plan. The Soviets had a grand plan and so far, we were lucky it was never executed.
Today, it would seem, we are not so sure.
If so, inclined, it is possible to obtain from www.redatlasbook.com printed facsimile wall maps of your local town in Cyrillic as seen by Soviet military cartographers. If I owned a local pub, I’d definitely put one up on the wall alongside the more usual and ubiquitous 16th Century maps of John Speed.
Article by Anthony Lipmann
Published by East-West Review, Spring/Summer 2025
The Journal of the GB-Russia Society
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