Secret Soviet Posters Demystify Map Symbols
▻https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/maps-soviet-symbols-spy-cartography-posters
During the Cold War, the Soviet military mapped the entire world. This secret program was one of the most ambitious mapping efforts ever undertaken, and it produced thousands—perhaps even millions—of maps of every part of the planet. It also produced these clever training posters, which show in a very visual way how the symbols used on Soviet military maps corresponded to things in the real world.
The posters offer insight into the remarkable range of symbols the Soviets used to create their maps. There are symbols differentiating types of power plants, factories, and train stations, to name just a few examples.
The posters, each roughly 2 feet by 3 feet, were discovered in a map shop in Riga, Latvia by John Davies, a British map enthusiast who’s been studying the Soviet military maps for more than a decade. The owner of the map shop had acquired the posters along with an enormous cache of military maps after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s. The posters appear in a new book, The Red Atlas, by Davies and Alexander Kent, a geographer at Canterbury Christ Church University.
#soviétisme #cartographie #manipulation #urss #union_soviétique #sémiologie #symbolique