Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, its legacy & the accompanying Russian-American tension continues to loom large. Russia`s access to detailed information on the United States & its allies may not seem so shocking in this day of data clouds & leaks, but long before we had satellite imagery of any neighborhood at a finger`s reach, the amount the Soviet government knew about your family`s city, street, & even your home would astonish you. Revealing how this was possible, The Red Atlas is the never-before-told story of the most comprehensive mapping endeavor in history & the surprising maps that resulted. From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, & London to towns like Pontiac, MI & Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories & ports, or more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, & bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths & channels around rivers & harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet feet on the ground. The Red Atlas
Includes:: over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance & cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers & the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us. A fantastic historical document of an era that sometimes seems less distant, The Red Atlas offers an uncanny view of the world through the eyes of Soviet strategists & spies.