The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Mapped the World | Hacker News Reader

The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Mapped the World

redatlasbook.com

151 pointschippy66 comments

Here's a Soviet map of the San Francisco Bay Area:

https://i.imgur.com/BxDJC6f.jpg (direct link)

https://imgur.com/a/FiEGm (Imgur page in case the above doesn't work)

The map appears to date from the early 1970s: Highway 280 is there but appears to have Cañada Road routing from before the ridge freeway was finished. Or I could be misreading that part of the map and it is from later, maybe the 1980s?

It's interesting how many inaccuracies there are. Living in Menlo Park, I checked a few local landmarks. Palo Alto Airport is in the right place, but where is San Carlos Airport? They seem to have moved it across the street from Facebook!

And note the airport near where 280 and Highway 92 cross.

The map is also very hard to read. Look at Highway 101. Unlike 280, it's mostly in white, but if you follow it through Redwood City just north of Woodside Road (Highway 84), it looks like 101 is routed along Veterans Boulevard - which was bypassed years before this map was made. If you look again, there is a brown stretch that is close to the actual freeway alignment.

Then follow 280 down into Los Altos, where it changes from brown to white as it approaches Cupertino and into San Jose. This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme.

Many of the local streets are recognizable but have a very approximate hand-drawn look to them. I'll be curious to hear what anyone else notices in their neighborhood.

This is easily the most interesting, and worst quality, map of the Bay Area I've seen. I wonder why it has so many little things wrong, when they could have simply sent a spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to read road map?

First of, direct links to imgur seems to just reroute to the imgur page these days.

Secondly, i suspect the inaccuracies comes from using satellite photos to draw the maps.

Why would they have used satellite photos when they could just have taken out a subscription to National Geographic and get all the maps they wanted, or bought a Rand McNally road atlas, or a stack of Michelin maps or... well, you get it: there was no shortage of maps of 'the free west' at their disposal. Where satellite photos came into play it would have been to fill in the blanks left by those maps: things which showed up on satellite photos but were missing on recent maps were clearly of interest.

Well, they wouldn't have trusted US maps. After all, their own commercial maps had intentional inaccuracies on them.[0]

But also it would have put the map-making organization out of work.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-m...

So then send a spy in to buy the maps, and validate that important landmarks and military bases are in the "correct" places.

That's not as easy as it sounds, especially in those days.

I'm trying to think of a job or activity that involves scoping out military bases, keeping detailed records of their locations AND getting them home without getting caught at any step in the process. Even today taking a photo of the wrong building in the wrong country can get you into deadly trouble.

Even if your agent is successful, how do you know that he is not misleading you? You now have to risk losing another agent doing the same thing again, just to make sure. Even if your agents don't get caught, they may have come to the attention of and be secretly monitored by the local intelligence services, just to see what they are up to.

Lastly, is confirming the specific location of a base worth losing one or more spies over when knowing the general area is already "good enough"? Your bombers can confirm the location with their eyes (I know of at least one USSR aircraft design with windows on the bottom of the cockpit for exactly this purpose), and your nuclear warhead doesn't really care which side of the road an airport is on.

> Even if your agents don't get caught, they may have come to the attention of and be secretly monitored by the local intelligence services, just to see what they are up to.

Or your agent may have been "turned" by the opposition and they're feeding incorrect information back to you.

Heh... I made a bunch of wallpapers out of edited versions of this map a few years ago... I can't find them on Imgur mobile (shittiest mobile view of my thousands of pics up there)

But I'll find on desktop and find them...

> spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to read road map?

How do you know that it is accurate?

At least it will be accurate where normal people usually drive--otherwise those normal people would complain.

Before GPS, it was mostly the topology that mattered to motorists, but the military probably wanted accurate coordinates on everything.

True! Of course topology includes getting the petrol station on the right side of the road.

I even heard of some maps with a 'sliding scale' that eg has the city centre larger. You can't even do that on a flat piece of paper without serious distortions in your coordinates.

Good point: the gas station road map probably has trap streets on it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

If we couldn't catch the spies for spying, at least we could catch them for copyright violation.

Given how far off from the city centers many of those place names were -- look where they put Саннивейл, Маунтин-Вью, and good lord, Сан-Хосе, for example - it's good to know that when the Red Dawn[1]-style invasion finally came, their paratroopers would have been horribly confused at where they landed. Thinking they were about to land on the roof of the Blue Cube, but getting ambushed in a parking of some Fry's or Denny's instead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn

i wonder what navigation system North Korea is using/planning to use for its ballistic missiles. Commercial GPS signal with fallback on good old star-based plus inertial?

GPS has a "speed limit" for that reason:

> In GPS technology, the term "COCOM Limits" also refers to a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft).[2] This was intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile-like applications.

/EDIT SEE BELOW

commercially available GPS receivers do normally implement the limits. This is why i said "commercial GPS signal" as the signal itself doesn't have any such limit, and anyone can make their own receiver without such speed/altitude limits and with higher accuracy than typical commercial receiver.

I had that thought in the back of my mind. Thanks for clarifying

What did the ICBMs from the cold war (pre-GPS) use? Don't need GPS to direct ballistic missiles. Besides, I don't think US ballistic missiles depend on GPS either, a scenario where GPS is one of the first targeted systems is not unimaginable.

>What did the ICBMs from the cold war (pre-GPS) use?

AFAIK star-based and inertial navigation.

I wonder what navigation system North Korea is using/planning to use for its ballistic missiles.

For the shipping containers (not ballistic missiles) they'll most likely smuggling these in on, for the next few years, any COTS system (on an appropriately flagged freighter) will suffice to get them across the Pacific. From there they'll just usual visual identification to get it close enough to place it could do enough damage. Like near the Embarcadero, say.

Soviets had clandestine beacons set up all over USA, and they also had an ability to home on civilian transmitters

A bit more haunting for me on the east coast, the Pentagon:

https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/detail-sovi...

That's pretty cool, do you suppose the water depth is in fathoms, meters, or just incorrect?

Somewhat related: the 'metric inch'. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_i...)

> This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme.

It looks to me that it's to do with contrast against the surroundings. The build up areas are brown and the roads through them are white, when the roads leave the build up area they change to brown. This contrasts against the white background giving a visual continuation of the road.

The brown sections of the road are also thicker, perhaps that indicates multiple lanes or even possibly different road surfaces.

I remember a talk from a map librarian who said that the Soviets didn't just copy western maps, as they often had more detail and unique elements that the western maps didn't have. One thing, for example was the heights of bridges, and widths of roads.

You might want to jump straight into the examples: https://redatlasbook.com/cityplans

Flash is needed though...

Makes sense about the bridges and roads thing. You need to know that for tanks. Even today in Germany you’ll see tiny bridges crossing a stream, a sign right by that says “this bridge rated for 70,000 pounds” (so can hold multiple tanks at once).

Multiple? A Main Battle Tank such as the German Leopard 2 weighs 62,300 kg (137, 347 lb). Even a puny WW2 Sherman medium tank weighed in the neighborhood of 70,000 lb.

An M4 Sherman weighed about 35 tons when including fuel, crew and ammunition. So technically, it could hold two, though it would be a risky endeavor.

35 tons is close to 70000lbs

not to be pedantic, but in America 35 tons is exactly 70,000 lbs

Oops, I misread the comment about the bridge. I would assume German bridges would use metric measures.

A lot of bridges everywhere are marked with their capacity. I don't think it's necessarily for the purpose of tanks.

I think he relates to the bridge signs of the NATO.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Load_Classification

Interesting, never knew about this.

Is that literally true? I would have expected Germans to rate their bridges in tons, not pounds/pfund.

I live in Germany and have never seen a sign using pounds, only tons.

Read the German Wikipedia article on the subject which shows German signs in short tons (non-metric unit): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militärische_Lastenklasse

The class numbers only roughly correspond to weight, so you could just as well consider them metric tons (1000 kg).

You definitely can't consider them metric tons. If the bridge you're about to cross has a maximum advertised load of 120 sh tn and you consider it safe to drive your 120 m tn vehicle over the bridge on the basis of that you're going to be putting a 132.3 m tn load on the bridge, or roughly 10% more than it's rated for.

As I said above, these signs do not show a literal maximum weight. They show a load class.

Right, I was overly simplifying. I meant to say a 120 sh ton MLC-calculated weight, not a vehicle that's exactly 120 tons since as the article goes into the class needs to take into account axle count etc.

What I don't understand is your claim that "you could just as well consider them metric tons". These are short tons with caveats, i.e. the eventual number depends on more than just the raw weight, but the raw weight is one aspect of the calculation.

So if you were to make that calculation on the basis of metric instead of lbs how aren't you going to introduce something like a 10% error in the MLC you come up with?

You'll find lots in areas where the allied troops did their exercises. Around "Feldberg" (Wetterau) you'll find plenty of them.

That would likely be metric tons, or a little more than 2204 pounds. The US uses short tons, or exactly 2000 pounds.

Those are MLC (Military Load Classification) signs.

Make no mistake, we have that as well. Worldwide: https://www.sddc.army.mil/sites/TEA/Functions/SpecialAssista...

Is anyone else getting a non-secure warning from chrome?

According to qualys (https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.sddc.army...), that site uses an untrusted certificate.

You see that because the DoD uses their own root certificates for sites intended for internal use that browsers don't trust by default: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/147606/why-woul...

If you were afflicted with the military and were planning on using these sites on your own hardware regularly, you'd install their certificates: https://iase.disa.mil/pki-pke/Pages/tools.aspx

“If you were afflicted with the military....”

I just wanted to say that this is a truly excellent typo.

and i thought that i'd just learned new US English idiom :)

We can make it a new US English idiom!

Autocorrect always thinks it's smarter than me. Probably because it might be.

*Affiliated

And clicking 'Advanced' didn't allow the option of continuing!

> When Google Chrome tried to connect to www.sddc.army.mil this time, the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials. [...] You cannot visit www.sddc.army.mil right now because the website sent scrambled credentials that Google Chrome cannot process.

I had to type 'badidea' to bypass the error. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/42xd4i/chrome_dan...

I once talked to a guy working in the local government responsible for all-things-roads in a town in Germany. He showed me some maps and building plans of bridges and told me that these maps/plans were actually highly classified in the cold war.

Makes sense to me that the soviets collected everything.

Wired did an article on this topic: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/

> This is the never-before-told story of the world’s most comprehensive mapping endeavour

Is it? Arguably, the mapping efforts of Google and others have reached further and collected more and more accurate data (street view, lidar, etc.).

It's probably the most comprehensive in terms of personnel and man-hours; those other mapping efforts are highly automated, but the descriptions of these maps imply a lot of people on the ground making them so detailed, since for a lot of the map details I don't see how you could reasonably get them from looking at a satellite map or a few public records. (Or perhaps they simply mean most comprehensive as in up to that point in time, which is a legitimate amount of hyperbole such an endeavour.)

Check Amap, they have coloured 3d maps of all global cities with photo textures.

http://www.navibiz.com.cn/e/NewsFocus/nf-123-02.html

Interesting.

For what it's worth: Google Earth (and Google Maps) have 3d buildings and vegetation etc now, too.

(But I wonder whether it's based on new data, or they just use machine learning to guess the 3d shapes from the 2d data they already had.)

in case of autonavi, their 3d maps are human modeled and textured just like a giant 3d game

As astonishingly accurate as Google's maps are, they lack a lot of resolution and data for under-developed regions like Oceania and Central Asia. The quality of the Soviet mapping projects were such that they're still competitive with a lot of the commercial offerings today for the more remote regions of the planet.

However civilian maps were deliberately obfuscated in the Soviet Union. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-m...

This site has some great links: https://sovietmaps.com/resources

Meanwhile, the SR71 made pictures

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