Hot geospatial intelligence from a Cold War: the Soviet military mapping of towns and cities

Abstract

As part of its secret military mapping program the Soviet Union produced large-scale maps and plans of hundreds of towns and cities around the world. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent fall of communism saw the eventual closure or transformation of cartographic factories in the former Soviet republics, and, for the first time, these highly detailed products of geospatial intelligence became available to a wider audience. This paper focuses on maps and plans of non-Soviet towns and cities that were produced from the 1940s to the 1990s. Through a comparison of their style and content with contemporary cartographic and documentary sources, it aims to examine the key questions of how and why they were made, before exploring their possible strategic value.

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