Davies and Kent see the maps not so much as a guide to invasion, but as a helpful resource in the course of taking over the world. Very little is known about how the Soviet military made these maps, but it appears they used whatever information they could get their hands on.
Some of it was relatively easy to come by. In the U. Geological Survey legend has it the Soviet embassy in Washington, D. To obtain more obscure information, they would have had to get creative.
In this map of San Diego, the added detail may have come from satellite imagery, which the Soviets had access to after the launch of their first spy satellite in In other cases, detail may have come directly from sources on the ground. According to one account , the Russians augmented their maps of Sweden with details obtained by diplomats working at the Soviet embassy, who had a tendency to picnic near sites of strategic interest and strike up friendly conversations with local construction workers.
One such conversation, on a beach near Stockholm in , supposedly yielded information about Swedish defensive minefields—and led to the Soviet spy being deported after a Swedish counterintelligence agent lurking nearby overheard the conversation. Exactly how the Soviet maps came to be available in the West is a touchy subject.
They were never meant to leave the motherland, and they have never been formally declassified. In , a retired Russian colonel was convicted of espionage , stripped of his rank, and sentenced to 12 years in prison for smuggling maps out of the country.
In researching the book, Kent and Davies had hoped to speak with some of former military cartographers who worked on the maps, but they never found anyone willing to talk. As the Soviet Union broke up in the late s, the maps began appearing in the catalogs of international map dealers. Telecommunications and oil companies were eager customers, buying up Soviet maps of central Asia, Africa, and other parts of the developing world for which no good alternatives existed.
Aid groups and scientists working in remote regions often used them too. For anyone who lived through the Cold War there may be something chilling about seeing a familiar landscape mapped through the eyes of the enemy, with familiar landmarks labeled in unfamiliar Cyrillic script. Even so, the Soviet maps are strangely attractive and very well made, even by modern standards. All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. James Gadsden, the U.
The treaty settled the dispute over the location of the Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas, and established the final Former Philippines Senate president Ferdinand Marcos is inaugurated president of the Southeast Asian archipelago nation. Ferdinand Marcos was a law student in the late s, when he was tried Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan during the war, is born in Tokyo.
Having already earned a reputation for sternness and Sometime over the course of the night and the early morning of December , , Grigory Efimovich Rasputin, a self-proclaimed holy man, is murdered by Russian nobles eager to end his influence over the royal family. Rasputin, a Siberian-born muzhik, or peasant, who But on December 30, , the quartet of British rockers preparing for their fifth-ever gig in the United States were using propane heaters to keep themselves and Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
A fire in the Iroquois Theater in Chicago, Illinois, kills more than people on December 30, Bolsheviks set up the Cheka Organization in December and embarked on systematic terrorist movements. The whites were defeated by the rivalry among their allies, despite all their help. Bolsheviks began to occupy the lost lands again. The Bolsheviks who succeeded in the south could not hold back in the North and in they accepted the independence of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Finland.
Since then, Moscow has abandoned the policy of Russianization and recognized the language and culture headmen. The name of the country was changed to the Soviet Socialist Republic and these autonomies was recognized by the Constitution. These countries started to support Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania, which are called the health corridor, to prevent the spread of the Bolsheviks. In July , a constitution was adopted in the 5th Congress of the Soviets, which would set an example for the and constitutions.
During the sessions, the Congress delegated its powers to the Central Executive Committee of its own choice of members, which elected the highest governmental body in the Bolshevik system, Sovnarkom. The civil war placed the dictatorship of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In this system, the Central Committee, which governed the Party, elected the personnel of the organization and political offices. The central committee consisted of twenty members elected at the party congress.
In this period industrial enterprises, foreign and domestic trade were nationalized. The collapse of production as a result of the First World War and the civil war resulted in the death of millions of people in the famine and the rebellion of Kronstadt sailors.
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