The Soviet Military’s Eerily Detailed Guide to San Diego
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A 1980 map of San Diego made by the Soviet military. KENT LEE / EAST VIEW GEOSPATIAL
DURING THE COLD War, the Soviet military mapped the entire world in one of the most ambitious mapping projects ever undertaken (see
this feature article for more about these amazing maps, and the unlikely group of scholars trying to figure out how they were made—and why). The maps are fascinating to look at, and for those of us who grew up during the paranoid days of the Cold War,
seeing your hometown covered in cyrillic text is a bit unsettling.
But the Soviets didn’t stop at just making some of the most accurate and detailed maps of the day. Some of the medium scale maps of include extremely detailed descriptions of the area–everything from the load-bearing capacities of bridges to the paving materials of the roads. (Yes, comrade, they will accommodate your tanks!)
A Soviet map of Altan-Emel, a remote region of China near the border with Russia and Mongolia, for example, describes the
monasteries and other settlements in the area: The houses are wattle and daub, (rarely stone or wooden); the yards are normally fenced with a wattle and daub wall 1-2 meters in height. There are detailed notes on the local climate: The summer has the most gloomy days a year (up to 10 gloomy days a month). In other places, the Soviet maps include details on the
species, average diameter, and spacing of trees and the
prevailing wind direction at different times of year.
In the US, the Soviets mapped many cities down to the level of individual buildings. In some ways, these maps surpass the ones our own government produced. Soviet maps of US Navy installations in San Diego, for example, include details not shown on maps made by the US Geological Survey around the same time.
The Naval Training Center in San Diego is shown in far more detail on a 1980 Soviet map (left) than on a 1979 USGS map of the same area. In both maps the training center is at bottom left. KENT LEE / EAST VIEW GEOSPATIAL; USGS
The Soviet map of San Diego also comes with a long block of text. Intrigued, we had it translated, and it is published below in English for the first time.
It includes information about the terrain and climate during the dry season (June to September), almost all rivers dry up, and in spring, during rainfalls, they turn into impetuous impassable ********. There is information about the transportation and telecommunications grids. The length of airport runways and depth of waterways are noted, as are the products of local farms and factories. There is information about the local Navy and Marine installations (not surprising), as well as information about which are the nice parts of town (somewhat more surprising): The streets and intra-block sites are lined with shrubbery.
The amount of detail suggests the maps were intended for more than just military planning. It seems like information that could come in handy during an occupation. Or, as Alexander Kent, a geographer who’s studied the maps thinks, the Soviets may have used the maps, in an era before computers, as a way to organize what they knew about the world both inside and outside their borders.