Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/

by aw3c2 • 11 years ago

171 56 11 years ago

wired.com

gaius2• 11 years ago

If you are interested in wartime mapmaking and are in the UK, I highly recommend a visit to Hughenden

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hughenden/

And of course it's free for NT members :-)

gtirloni• 11 years ago

Guy’s company, Omnimap, was one of the first to import Soviet military maps to the West.

Import is a huge stretch. More like stealing state secrets (and now admitting to it publicly?).

ommunist13• 11 years ago

You are quite right.

Cthulhu_• 11 years ago

Technically, buying them - they were 'acquired' by the mentioned map making companies. TBF said state secrets kinda fell through when the USSR fell apart.

gaius2• 11 years ago

Can you steal from a state that doesn't even exist at the time?

hewhowhineth• 11 years ago

Not sure if this applies to the maps in question, but legal rights (and obligations) are handed down to successor country/countries. International treaties, debts and everything. Even Olympic medals I believe.

rdtsc2• 11 years ago

Yes you can, states that don't exist anymore have other states that inherit both their treasures, secrets, copyrighted works as well as debts. I understand that Russia is that state in general. The issue is complicated in case of ex Soviet Republics presumably.

But I would guess you also can't just storm into Mosfilm or Lenfilm (movie production studios) and start copying all their movies made during the Soviet times and selling them for profit.

PeterisP4• 11 years ago

Umm, in pretty much every country except Russia it is completely legal to violate Russian state secrets, and in pretty much any country other than USA it's legal to violate USA state secrets. The international buyer should be completely in the clear.

Furthermore, it's very likely that the seller also is completly legal - as long as it's outside of Russia but one of ex-USSR republics, their new legal systems generally don't prohibit distributing USSR state secrets, only documents that are classified by their own new authorities.

huhtenberg• 11 years ago

printed in red, was the Russian word секрет. Secret.

That'd be "секретно". "Cекрет" is what pirates print on their treasure maps in kindergarten :)

ak217• 11 years ago

Which is a nice way of saying that Greg Miller is putting on airs without running his work by a native speaker.

rm445• 11 years ago

Either that or the maps really had that word printed on them, for whatever reason.

dima55• 11 years ago

Hmmm? "Cекрет" is a noun. "Cекретно" is an adverb. Why is "Cекрет" inappropriate here?

wordbank2• 11 years ago

"Секрет" is more a social thing. Confidential information of bigger entities like government or business will be called "тайна".

foobarian2• 11 years ago

Weird that Russians wouldn't use a native root for such a basic concept. Plenty of Slavic languages have variations on "tajna." Maybe it's some bureaucratic term using a Westernized root to be fashionable.

rdtsc2• 11 years ago

"tajna."

That would be a noun, in other words, a particular state secret. You'd say "Eto gosudarstvenaya tayna" - this is a state secret.

But in English secret is both an adjective/adverb and noun, in other languages there might be two different words for it.

So it would be "secretno"(ru) = "secret"(en) and you might say "Eto sovershenno secretno"(ru) = "This is top secret"(en).

tetromino_• 11 years ago

Of course Russian has the word «тайна». It's the generic term for hidden, classified, protected, secret, or unknown information. And «государственная тайна» would be "state secret".

But the stamp on the maps wasn't just for indicating that they are some sort of state secret. It was for indicating the exact level of secrecy in the Russian classification system.

Those levels are «особой важности» (literally: of special importance), «совершенно секретно» (lit.: completely secret) and «секретно» (lit.: secret). And in US government terminology, they approximately correspond to "top secret", "secret", and "confidential", although the boundaries between the levels are defined somewhat differently.

pandaman2• 11 years ago

In Russian Empire the imperial court mostly spoke French so lower classes, aspiring to sound more like nobles, borrowed a whole lot of French words. Because of this many Slavic words now sound archaic or pretensions to a Russian speaker. E.g. тайна in Russian is more like 'enigma', definitely not 'classified/secret'.

mashmac2• 11 years ago

I have a colleague who flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's, and said the Soviet civilian maps were just terrible - they'd show roads in the wrong places and didn't show secret military bases, etc. He figured this out after accidentally flying over a Soviet army base in what is today eastern Ukraine... and then talked his East German military connection into getting him a copy of the military maps.

ommunist13• 11 years ago

As a former Soviet geodesist and forest inventory specialist, I must tell that military 1:50 000 maps are extremely accurate. What was intentionally skewed are civil 1:250 000 maps. The highest resolution and the best accuracy have been provided for so called forestry maps (1:10000).

themodelplumber2• 11 years ago

Wow, that's fascinating. Would you happen to have a website somewhere that documents your experiences? I'm really curious.

n0us2• 11 years ago

What would be the motivation for providing more accurate forestry maps?

dang• 11 years ago

As a former Soviet geodesist and forest inventory specialist,

Well that takes the cake for the day.

gleb• 11 years ago

"flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's" does not compute. Soviet Union had a whole branch of military dedicated to anti-aircraft warfare, meant to stop such things.

But yuh, the civilian maps were terrible - as the article describes.

usaphp• 11 years ago

Why would they show secret military bases on civilian maps for non Russian solders? Sounds reasonable to me, they are secret for a reason, no? Am I missing something?

PeterisP4• 11 years ago

Civilian maps were intentionally distorted. In various places the details were completely wrong - for example, smaller roads near some Baltic coast beaches (e.g. "potential conflict/landing sites") were simply drawn with no relation to reality to fill in the space with something superficially resembling the density of roads but with different angles/locations/everything; the locals knew to not rely on this and for construction/planning purposes you used different maps than the civilians.

ommunist13• 11 years ago

So and where are IP rights of the still living former Soviet topographers? Is Mapstor paying royalty to specialists still operating at the 5th Cartography Enterprise in Minsk? British have been pirates for ages. Old habits never die.

gwern3• 11 years ago

Presumably if there were any IP rights at all (what with it being a Communist state), they were assigned to the USSR government or, like products of the US government, are born into the public domain.

psykovsky2• 11 years ago

So, you mean everything Snowden released is also public domain? Because those maps were classified, didn't you read?

ommunist13• 11 years ago

What? The USSR was one of the creators of the framework IP protection conventions. Russia is legal successor of the USSR and paid its foreign debts by the way. So what Mapstor does is plain ripping off Russian IP, since maps in question were produced after 1971. UPD: and Belarusian IP rights too. To be exact - legal department of the 5th Cartography Enterprise must file DMCA complaint agaist Mapstor and alike in such a situation. Please do not think you can violate IP property of the USSR. otherwise, your own heir will feel uneasy when such best ripping practices will be applied to them. Inherited property is still a property, isn't it?

PeterisP4• 11 years ago

Copyright of USSR-made works is not public domain; tracing the owner is tricky at times, but [obviously] works where the copyright inheritor is hard to trace are pretty much the opposite of public domain - you're not allowed to copy w/o permission, even if that permission is tricky to obtain.

The "made by gov't -> public domain" is an USA-specific detail that doesn't apply in most other places.

If specific people owned the copyright, then it's as usual for any other works; if a specific USSR institution owned the copyright, then the ownership will be determined by the early 1990ies transition/reorganization laws and contracts; if 'USSR' owned it, then it's owned by Russia afterwards, not public domain.

PeterisP4• 11 years ago

Well, copyright would protect only making new copies and redistributing them, but it definitely is legal to resell the physical maps that were made by, e.g., 5th Cartography Enterprise in 1980ies, distributed throughout USSR in rather large quantities (the access was controlled, but there were many of those maps made) and then inherited by various ex-USSR countries and enterprises.

No royalty or permission is required when [re]selling existing copies of copyrighted works, copyright protects only making copies.

ommunist13• 11 years ago

With exception to scales better than 1:50000 maps, I am afraid these are again classified in Russia. And there are these famous regulations applied - http://goo.gl/OF5bSn . Basically everything that has relief from 1:50000 is classified. However you can still have 1:20000 electronic relief of Russia from torrents, if you don't legally care.

cpach• 11 years ago

”Anyone old enough to have lived through those paranoid days of mutually assured destruction will find it a bit disturbing to see familiar hometown streets and landmarks labeled in Cyrillic script.”

I was only a child during the Cold War, but yes, a few years ago when I saw one of these Soviet maps of the Swedish Tiveden forest, it felt quite strange. The quality of the map was indeed magnificent.

n0us2• 11 years ago

I often struggle to find even the most basic information in online maps. Worse, when I am in a rural area and have no service I find no service at all. I've thought recently about keeping some paper maps in my car for such occasions, might have to look into getting copies of some of these.

aw3c2• 11 years ago

Get OSMAnd.

xnbya• 11 years ago

In the UK on bing maps you can view the OS maps, they are probably the most detailed online maps.

david-given• 11 years ago

There aren't many things which the British do really, really well, but the Ordnance Survey is one of them.

Bing have a license, but it's geolocked so non-UK people don't see the OS maps. streetmap.co.uk is where I go; the actual website is terrible but they have the OS maps in 1:25000 and 1:50000 (and some of the non-topographic smaller scale maps):

http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=191074&y=840453&z=0&sv=iv54...

Bear in mind that that map is suppose to be 4cm to a kilometre. On my screen it's about three times too big.

After growing up with these maps (we were even taught how to read them at school!), visiting other countries and having to struggle with tourist maps is deeply painful.

olzhas• 11 years ago

Why people don't use USSR instead of Russia? or Soviet Russia?

temo4ka• 11 years ago

Off topic: is anyone else annoyed by those background-fixed image sections? Because the height of the section is bigger than the height of the viewport while scrolling past those sections it appears for a moment that the page stopped responding; the effect is especially prominent on wide screens.

Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers

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