‘Red Atlas’ filled with keys to Kremlin takeover
THE COMMIES were ready to take over Central Park.
A trove of secret, highly detailed Soviet maps from the early 1980s shows street-level views of New York, Washington and other major cities — information that could have been used in the event of a Communist takeover, according to a new book.
More than 900 buildings and other sites — including Central Park Zoo and Kennedy Airport — are noted on the N.Y.C. maps, according to John Davies, co-author of the new book “The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World.”
“You can’t say that these were just copied off local maps because they’ve applied so much more information,” Davies told the Daily News. “They show information derived from a lot of different sources.”
Cartographers spent years on the ambitious, military-funded maps, which live on decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The sophisticated maps include information such as the height of tunnels and the weightbearing capacity of bridges — essential data for troops trying to access a region, which was likely obtained by sources on the ground. Davies called the collection a sort of old-fashioned Wikipedia — repositories for knowledge that Davies suspects could have come in handy if the Cold War escalated.
“We have no idea why this was done, but it seems common sense to say, well, knowledge is power. If you find information, you collect it and put it on a map and sooner or later, Communism, by some evolutionary process will dominate,” he said.
“So it seemed to them that when it dominates the world, the Russians are the leading Communist country, so they will be in charge, so they need to know this information,” he said.
Davies, a retired computer information systems consultant and lifelong map enthusiast, said he first came across the Soviet maps in 2000 while on a work trip to Riga, Latvia.
“They were stored in secret depots and one still existed in Latvia, and it was abandoned and people raided it and the maps got liberated,” Davies said.
Davies purchased armfuls of the maps during subsequent trips to the country.
They are printed on high-quality paper and are striking in appearance. New York City alone takes up eight large-scale sheets.
“It’s a hugely impressive project that ran when the Soviet Union was collapsing and the quality of goods in shops was very poor,” Davies said.
Some of the data comes from local maps that were publicly available at the time of the project. Information was collected between 1971 and 1979, and the maps were printed in 1982, Davies said.
Maps of New York are remarkably detailed but also show some mistakes. A map of Central Park classifies its terrain and denotes lawns and open grasslands.
The reservoir is incorrectly labeled for the aqueduct supplying its water, Davies said.
The map even shows that the reservoir’s vertical bank makes it suitable for mooring ships.
Numbers on it correspond to an index that was published along with the maps.
Davies never obtained a copy of the index book, but remarked that nearly 1,000 places in New York had been marked.
“Even today, it’s impressive,” he said.