What have the Russians ever done for us? What, apart from vodka, Tchaikovsky, the Periodic Table, radiators and winning World War II? - Yes.
- Nothing. Wrong. This is the story of perhaps the greatest and secretest mapping exercise ever undertaken. Welcome to Map Men. - We're the men.
- And here's the map. β« Map Men, Map Men
β« Map Map Map Men. This is a map of the south east of England. It's geographically recognisable, but the spelling seems a little... well, Polish. There's Istbon Saufend-on-Sji Hejstynz Dzylynem Tanbrydz-Lelz? Where did this hilarious map come from? It was made for the use of the Polish Air Force. All the notoriously hard-to-pronounce English place names have been transliterated - spelt phonetically so the Polish pilots can pronounce them as Britishly as possible. It's actually quite useful for doing the opposite of what it was meant for - teaching English speakers how to spell in Polish. - My Polish is better already.
- Dobrze zrobione! Haha... yes. It dates back to the Cold War, at a time when both sides were preparing for it to suddenly get hot. This famously involved America and Russia massing enough nuclear warheads to destroy the entire world many times over, which at the time was considered a perfectly reasonable use of taxpayer money. But it less famously involved the Soviet production of thousands of maps that to this day very few people know very little about with even more people knowing even less. These were part of an enormous military mapping exercise begun by Stalin and continued by a series of other, less famous, but probably nicer Russian leaders throughout the Cold War. Because they're Soviet made, you might expect these maps to be somehow laughably defective like the ones we discussed in an episode about Soviet maps that left enormous blank spaces for places they wanted people to forget about. Don't watch it now, watch it later. But this belies their true map-making brilliance, because as we're about to see, they were actually scarily good at it. Here's a British-made OS map of Pembroke Dock from 1953, with a conspicuous lack of detail in this flying boat base which, by the way, should surely be called a swimming plane base. Definitely. But the secret Soviet map of the same area from 1950 has far more detail including buildings, dockyards, and an entire pier that the OS left out. Even American military maps were out-accuratted by the Russians. Here's the USGS version of Hanscom Field Air Force Base And here's the Soviet version from the same time. And in a far too easy game of spot the difference, the American map doesn't show the security fence, doesn't show this runway extension, and doesn't show this runway at all. So, how did the Russians do it? In 1962, the Soviets got an automatic map contemporising plug-in, the Zenit Satellite Programme. This meant they could easily spot American runway extensions from the safety of the Earth's orbit. But a space bird's eye view doesn't tell the whole story. The Soviets would no doubt have loved to know the location of the UK's eleven bunkers for the regional seats of government in case of nuclear war, like this one in Cambridge, which from the air just looks like another boring bit of university building. Also, spotting a long trench being dug in Teesside, the Russian cartographers guessed this to be a road under construction when in fact, they were just laying gas pipes. Idiots. So to help them fill in the blanks, the Soviets weren't averse to simply copying published maps that already existed. In fact, they perfected the art of copying old maps to an impressive T. Their 1990 map of Bradford includes exact spot heights that feature on three different editions of OS maps from 1982, 1938 and 1909. So, either the Russians just happened to survey the heights of the exact same spots, or, more likely, they showed a flagrant disregard for British copyright law. Even the apparently simple art of map copying has its pitfalls, which led to some revealing mistakes. On this map of London, Her Majesty's Theatre is labelled in the index as "Residence of the Queen". Prince Philip, I'm Home! (applause) If the Russians were going to get the competitive edge they needed in the Cold War map-off they were going to have to employ the ultimate and Cold-Warriest of weapons - spies! The rapid expansion of Russian spying under Stalin continued throughout the century until, no matter where you lived in the world, you were always at least 10,000 miles from a Russian spy. Secret agents would go on extended foreign tours to gather intelligence. In a bid to blend in unnoticed, a popular tactic was for agents to set up a picnic close to a construction site giving them a chance to have a good nosey at whatever this building, road, railway or pipeline was all about. It's remarkable and terrifying how much information the Soviets were able to gather for their maps that could only have been procured through spies. They recorded the names of factories and what they produced, measured the loading capacities of bridges, and even went as far as to note the average distances between trees in woodland. Zis is not what I signed up for. Even though the Russians were mapping different cultures and landscapes from across the world's continents, all their maps were produced in an impressively standardised form. There was a clear colour scheme, and a list of symbols so comprehensive that officers were given a 220 page handbook to help them read the maps properly. The only reason we've begun to understand the scale of Soviet mapping at all, given these maps were... and still are... heavily classified, is in no small part thanks to two British authors. In 2017, John Davies and Dr Alexander Kent published 'The Red Atlas - How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World' which we absolutely have to mention, not only because it's excellent but also because it's the only source material available on the topic. How John and Doctor Alex got their hands on the maps in the first place is a pretty remarkable story in its own right. After the Cold War became more of a Lukewarm Peace, ex-Soviet officers were ordered to ship classified material back to Moscow or have it destroyed, including thousands of secret maps. Opportunistic map dealers spotted a chance to pick up some illicit cartography making them available to the West for the first time. It was only when John and Doctor Alex went travelling around map shops in Eastern Europe that anybody discovered the scale of what the Soviets had achieved. - Ooooooh! Thanks to their colossal cartographic collecting, we now know how the Soviets made their incredibly detailed maps. But the scarier thing to think about is... why? Looking at all of these maps together reveals something fascinating. They don't suggest a superpower preparing to blow the world to smithereens. Instead, the attention to detail suggests they wanted to leave it un-nuked, and merely invade and own this territory. An invasion that would have included their Polish allies, which explains our funny phonetic Polish map. On the one hand, it's a chilling foreboding of a gruesome invasion that thankfully never took place On the other, it's nice to know that if the Polish troops had invaded they'd have at least been thoughtful enough not to pronounce it "Froam". Today, the threat of conflict between east and west is within satisfactory levels but Russian spying is nonetheless still very much a thing. There could be a Russian spy hiding in your computer right now. It's heavily rumoured that Jay is in fact a Kremlin twitter bot. ΠΠΎΡΠΌΠ°Ρ! Thankfully, the Soviet maps were never used for their intended purpose of invading the baddies or as we in England call them, the goodies. But that doesn't mean they haven't been used at all. When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, it was Soviet maps they turned to for help, as they included far more detail than their own versions, including for example the different times of year that various mountain roads were passable. The maps were also widely used by big oil companies as they explored new areas for drilling across Africa and Asia. So, perhaps there's one more thing we should add to the list of things the Russians did for us... which is something they did for them, tried desperately to conceal, but was of such high quality it escaped anyway to assist with the invasion of a sovereign nation, as well as rapidly accelerating climate change. - Thanks Russia(!)
- You're welcome. I mean... oops. Loquacious? No. Casserole? No. Imperceptible? Nowhere near. This is a hard one. Guess The Word is a hard game. Is it potato? No. Do we have to play this every Wednesday? It's none of those words. Aargh!! Definitely not potato? Yes. Ooh! Definitely not. Oh. Hang on, where's Uncle Mark? Hello all. Sorry I'm late. Spandex? Where've you been? I've been doing a photography course on Skillshare. What's Skillshare? Skillshare in an online community for creative people. It's kind of like YouTube, except all the videos are made by experts in all sort of skills. If there's a thing you want to learn to do, like illustration, graphic design, photography, animation, fine art, music production, film and video, marketing, productivity, or web development, Skillshare is the best place to find a video course and start becoming an expert yourself. But I just enjoy thinking of words. Then you'll really enjoy the creative writing course from writer and director Joshua Dickinson. He shows you how to turn your film idea into a proper screenplay, breaking it down into simple steps with great tips about structure, layout, character and dialogue. So it's fun, and it's a good use of your time? Exactly. Now that's what we should be doing with our Wednesdays. And Skillshare is a affordable too - only ten dollars a month for a whole year's membership. I can afford that! And there's a secret special offer. The first 1,000 people to use the link in the description will get a free free free free free free free trial of Skillshare Premium membership. And the more of you sign up, the more money Skillshare pay to Map Men. Alright then. I'll sign up for the free free free free free free free trial of Skillshare right after we've guessed this word. Steeple, catapult, orogeny, residual, spoons, quirky, falafel... Pota...toes? Uncle Colin wins! Congratulations, Uncle Colin. Same time next week, everyone? (all) No!
I actually own an original Soviet map of my hometown (Chester) I got in a map shop in Riga. They knew about military objects neither me (unsurprising) nor my parents knew about!
This time it was Map Men Map Men Map Map Map....Men
USSR: Creates detailed maps to invade other nations and spread communism with
American Oil Companies: I can do capitalism with this
The Russian maps weren't perfect.
I'm from Denmark, and we're the stopgap at the western end of the Baltic Sea, where the Russians have to pass to, well, go places.
So during the cold war we had a super secret "lair" of sorts, dug out into the chalky cliffs of the Baltic facing coast of Zealand, and fitted that with all manner of listening and spotting devices, so we could tell the rest of Nato if shit was going down and the Russians were sending their Baltic fleet into the Atlantic.
However, this rather important base feature nowhere on the Russian maps discovered after the cold war.
So, yeah, we out-sneakied the sneaky Russians. Go Denmark! :D
Finally a new map men video!
I have the Soviet map of Barcelona sitting in my basement (until I can get around to hanging it somewhere)
The Catalonia Cartographic Institute has a bunch of high quality scans of Soviet Maps of cities around the world available for free
https://cartotecadigital.icgc.cat/digital/search/searchterm/govern%20sovietic/mode/all/order/datea/page
You can find other maps on the References page of the Red Atlas Book Website
https://redatlasbook.com/references
For other Mark Cooper-Jones fans, I just found a clip of him doing stand-up on YouTube. https://youtu.be/tXUXnIyJGnk
GET OUT OF MY HEAD
Great video, subscribed....., but shouldn't the title be "Why DID Russia have the best maps of Britain?"?