https://literaryreview.co.uk/which-way-to-uondsuert
But only now, looking through this extraordinary book, do I appreciate the magnitude of the enterprise which back in 1991 I had gleaned just a hint of. It turns out that the Soviet government??s secret military mappers created a cartographic record not just of their own country but of the entire world, laid out in mind-boggling and unnerving detail.
Beginning in the 1940s, they charted the globe in seven different scales, capturing and storing the information in thousands upon thousands of classified maps that the rest of the world had almost no inkling of. Some laid out the topography of an area, with a focus on features that might aid or impede transport: roads, railways, bridges and mountain passes were marked, and even the density of forests and depth of rivers. Other, larger-scale maps looked at cities, providing street indexes and emphasising ??important objects??, such as barracks and dockyards. Hundreds of symbols and colours decoded the landscapes: a thin blue line for rivers less than sixty metres wide; a thick blue line for bigger waterways; two crossed black anvils for a mine; pink shading for fire-resistant urban areas; specked green for wooded copses. As the authors of The Red Atlas, John Davies and Alexander J Kent, put it, it was ??the most comprehensive global topographic project ever undertaken??.
