The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World

Intro: As the Head of The British Army predicts that Russia may start a war, a new book reveals they’ve had detailed maps of our secret military complexes for decades

FOLLOWING the events such as 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 mass death.

It was Stalin, the then General Secretary of the Communist Party, who personally signed-off the lists of execution quotas. He had avidly read and annotated torture reports and was responsible for sanctioning what was to befall. In 1937 and 1938 alone, more than 681,000 people received a bullet in the back of the neck.

Terror was used by the KGB and its forerunner, the NKVD (the secret police), to ensure obedience and to suppress discussion and dissent. As capitalism was overthrown, businesses were nationalised, private property was confiscated, and the mass media was controlled.

Government regulations and bureaucracy intensified, the dictatorship of the proletariat was imposed, and Stalin’s purges eliminated political rivals, scholars, artists, and anyone else who was of mild intelligence. In the Ukraine, food, grain and livestock were requisitioned and some 4 million people were deliberately starved – implemented through an organised famine, or genocide, to punish “anti-party elements and saboteurs”.

Had NATO not kept them the other side of the Iron Curtain, it was Stalin and his successors’ resolute ambition and intention to have brought their Marxist ideology to 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 designed and intended to support civil administrators when the “entire world is communist”.

On the evidence of their maps of Britain they imagined they could one day possess, the authors write that the “Russians didn’t miss much”.

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 transformation landscapes”.

The Russians also deployed people on the ground, quietly walking down the streets, looking. This was enacted through Le Carre-esque like double-agents who relayed back to Moscow details of factories, including their production outputs and ownership. The size and shape of buildings were of great interest. Every high-rise and low-rise in Southampton, for example, was known by the enemy.

The utilities, industries and transport systems were fully documented and recorded – the width of roads, the height and dimension of bridges, their load capacity and construction materials used. Local terrain was scrutinised – forests, the types of trees, height, girth and spacing. Railway signals, timetables, and even disused tracks were drawn, in case they could be reinstated.

The Russians were also 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. In 1919, all mapping activities were put under state supervision by Lenin.

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 humidity-controlled vaults.

Even within the Soviet hierarchy, military officers who were required to use maps for training and exercises had no idea of the extent and scope of Stalin’s project. Every map and chart had to be returned to the depot after use.

It is no quip to suggest that the Russians knew more about Britain than the average British citizen. On our own Ordnance Survey maps, for instance, there are frequent blanks, known as security deletions. Sensitive information is excluded from public view.

With the help of their spies and saboteurs, 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 Naval 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 melancholic and pensive as they recount the story of the Soviet cartographic enterprise. That story 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 involved is tremendously skilled. We are told that the “sheer beauty of the maps makes them mesmerising… the use of colours, lines and geometric shapes lends them an Art Deco feel.”

The Soviets transliterated many towns and cities for Warsaw Pact commanders. Rochester became Roczyste, Chatham labelled as Czetem, Herne Bay denoted as Hen-Bei, Margate became Magyt and Maidstone converted to Mejdsten.

Like William the Conqueror, it can be guessed where the Red Army planned to arrive on our shore. 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.

– The Red Atlas by John Davies and Alexander J. Kent is published by the University of Chicago Press for £26.50