These Soviet Maps of America Are Incredibly Detailed

At the height of the Cold War, the USSR had amazing hand-drawn maps of the USA, including our military installations.

Wired has a fantastic feature on some of the most intricate and unsettling maps we've ever seen. The Soviet military, or some other faction within the government of the USSR, made maps. Millions of them. Maps with the kind of detail just short of Google Street view, spanning the entire world, with cities broken down to the width of streets and the size of buildings.

John Davies, a software developer, is working on cataloging and digitizing some of them. He's even compared them with British land surveys made around the same time, finding that Russia knew things that the British agencies didn't, including sensitive military facilities. 

While much of our present map technology has the benefit of satellites, its estimated that whomever was making the Russian map surveys employed tens of thousands of on-the-ground surveyors. Given how many of the maps include sensitive locations in Western countries, it also points to some heavy espionage. Compare that to the United States, which used superior air recon methods to do its secret mapping. 

The maps include incredible "metadata," including the particulars of acoustics in a region on the map, meaning that while some of them were used for basic infrastructure planning in Russia, others were almost definitely meant for military planning. You know, because nothing says "up to nothing suspicious" like a map marked "top secret" that tells you how far away a snapping twig can be heard on enemy soil. 

Today there's a flourishing trade for these intricate creations, which reveal the awesome scope of Soviet intel and planning. Check out more examples in Wired's feature.

Source: Wired

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