Russia's plans to INVADE
ROGER LEWIS As the UK’s Army chief predicts Russia may start a war, a new book reveals they’ve had detailed maps of our secret military complexes for decades
BEWArE utopian schemes. There will be blood. After the excitement of the storming of the Winter Palace, in 1917, and the execution of the Tsar and the imperial family, the russian revolution ushered in a world of horror and death.
Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, who avidly read and annotated torture reports, personally signed lists of execution quotas. In 1937 and 1938 alone, 681,692 people received a bullet in the back of the neck.
Terror was used by the KGB and its forerunner, the NKVD, i.e. the secret police, to ensure obedience and suppress discussion and dissent. As capitalism was overthrown, businesses were nationalised, private property was confiscated and the mass media was controlled.
Bureaucracy was intensified, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, was imposed, and Stalin’s purges eliminated potential rivals, scholars, artists, military officers, and anyone else who was mildly intelligent. In the Ukraine, food, grain and livestock were requisitioned and 4 million people were deliberately starved — an organised famine, or genocide, to punish ‘anti-party elements and saboteurs’.
Had not NATO kept them the other side of the Iron Curtain, it was Stalin and his successors’ absolute ambition and intention to bring their mad Marxist ideology here and raise the hammer and sickle flag above London.
PArT of the ‘enormous and secret infrastructure’ of the Cold War involved the Soviets creating amazingly detailed maps, ‘useful for invading armies and occupiers’, which were intended to support civil administrators ‘when the entire world is communist’.
On the evidence of their maps of a Britain they imagined they could one day possess, ‘the russians didn’t miss much’, write the authors of this book.
Using high-altitude aircraft, satellite imagery and missiles bearing reconnaissance cameras, the russians plotted every inch of our islands, continually revising and redrawing the maps ‘to keep up with the transforming landscapes’.
The russians also deployed ‘people on the ground, quietly walking down the streets, looking’ — Le Carré-esque double-agents who sent back to Moscow details of factories, their output and ownership. The size and shape of buildings were of great interest. Every high-rise and low-rise dwelling in Southampton, for example, was known by the enemy.
The utilities, industries and transport systems were recorded — the width of roads, the height and dimension of bridges, their load capacity and construction material. Local terrain was scrutinised — forests, the type of trees, height, girth and spacing. railway signals, timetables, and even disused tracks were drawn, in case they could be reinstated.
The russians were very keen on marine areas and navigable rivers. They marked spot depths, dredged canals and tidal ranges. The water speed and flow at estuaries fascinated them — the Mersey at Liverpool, the Forth at Edinburgh, and the Medway at rochester and Chatham.
Mapping activities were put under state supervision by Lenin in 1919.
It was Stalin, however, who created the Military Topographic Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Army. It was a massive secret enterprise involving thousands of people. Up to 2 million maps were made of the West, which were kept under armed guard in a series of 25 humiditycontrolled vaults.
Even within the Soviet hierarchy, ‘army officers who were required to use maps for training and exercises had no idea of the extent and scope of the project’. Every map and chart had to be returned to the depot after use. ‘If it became damaged, even its remnants had to be returned.’
The joke is that the Russians knew more about Britain than the average British citizen, as on our own Ordnance Survey maps there are frequent blanks, called security deletions. Sensitive information is excluded from our view.
With the help of their spies, however, the Kremlin knew all about our secret military installations and complexes. In their Red Atlas they drew every hut and barrack at the Royal Navy dockyard at Pembroke, an RAF flying boat base.
They knew the berth length and channel depth at Chatham, where submarines were built and maintained. They could have found their way blindfolded around the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield, near Reading, where nuclear warheads are constructed. Even Google Maps omitted this place until recently.
John Davies and Alexander J. Kent grow wistful as they recount the story of the Soviet cartographic enterprise, which has never been told until now. The maps themselves, which began to be leaked to the West after the pulling down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ‘have rarely been publicly displayed’.
The craftsmanship is indeed tremendously skilled. ‘The sheer beauty of the maps makes them mesmerising,’ we are told. ‘The use of colours, lines and geometric shapes lends them an Art Deco feel.’ Possibly. I find it dead creepy to think that my very home was literally on the map if Moscow had ever invaded and won a war.
I live in Rochester, which the Soviets transliterated for Warsaw Pact commanders as Roczyste. Other places in the vicinity are Czetem/Chatham, Hen-Bei/ Herne Bay, Magyt/Margate and Mejdsten/Maidstone.
Like William the Conqueror, it can be guessed where the Red Army planned to arrive on our shores. Sussex and Kent were in the firing line. The Soviets were also very interested in Cambridge: ‘The lodging houses and their lecture halls are reminiscent of monasteries or ancient castles . . . there is rain on 12–14 days each month.’
The university is where all the spies were educated: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt. Perhaps Moscow assumed their battalions would get a big welcome when they turned up there in force.