Soviet spies in the Wye Valley
Complete with footpaths, pronunciation guides and population numbers – secret Soviet cold war maps of our countryside were even better than our own.
How did the Russians have better maps of our countryside than us?
THE MEANDERS OF the river and its north-south, wood-enfolded orientation tell you this is the Wye Valley, from Monmouth to Tintern Abbey; the Cyrillic script that something very odd is going on here. This is a map produced – unbeknownst to the West – in November 1981 at the Dunayev factory in Moscow, in part of a vast, secret Soviet project to map the world.
“The average Brit at the time would have been horrified to know maps like this existed” says John Davies, co-author of The Red Atlas, “Because it reveals the extent of Soviet surveillance and espionage.”
John found the map in Riga, Latvia in the early 2000s. “The maps had been held in depots across the Soviet Union, ready to be requisitioned by locallybased officers to be sent on missions” he says.
The maps were based on many different sources – including satellite spy photos, smuggled OS maps and to an unknown degree, boots on the ground. Detail was bafflingly rich in cities – including bridges’ loadbearing capacity, building material and clearance for boats, and in the countryside details like spot-heights were far more numerous than on British walkers’ maps. Chillingly, perhaps, “Place-names were spelled out phonetically in Cyrillic script, so that native Russian speakers could pronounce them and be understood by locals” says John.
Yet it’s in the very detail, he says, that – had we sight of these maps at the time – fears of nuclear armageddon should have been allayed. “There’d be no point in creating such detailed maps, plotting every footpath and farmhouse, if they were planning to nuke Britain – it wouldn't look much like the map afterwards.”
Instead suggests John, the USSR was compiling a world-wide, ‘ Wikipedia’ of geographic information, pending the time the whole world became communist: “Then the USSR would be in charge and they would need to know about everywhere.”