[Osmf-talk] Secret USSR cold war maps

Oleksiy Muzalyev oleksiy.muzalyev at bluewin.ch
Mon Jul 20 09:36:43 UTC 2015


Here is an interesting documentary about a cartography Soviet space 
station program Almaz (Russian: Алмаз, "Diamond") (from 38th minute): 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eid_cfsNLB0 . A satellite photo-camera 
operator says that still in 70s he could distinguish people walking in 
New York from space.

In early 40s Soviet officers had a serious difficulty to find a new 
tactics against the MG42 [1] machine gun. It had the rate of fire of 
1200 (!) rounds per minute, and an effective range of 2 kilometres. And 
it was portable. About half of million of them were produced (and it is 
still produced under another name).

By sad experience a way to somehow operate against the MG 42 was found. 
It was using the variations in elevation of an area of the earth's 
surface. There was a need to know the exact relief of an area and plan 
carefully any movements, using a slightest cover offered by the relief, 
buildings, underground infrastructure, etc. I think this explains this 
scale of work on detailed cartography. Many Soviet leaders, including 
Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and many others had been field 
officers and knew how it really was on the ground.

Leonid Brezhnev still in 80s was waking up at night and shouting that an 
invasion began. Nowadays it would be called PSTD [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MG_42
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_stress_disorder

brgds
Oleksiy

On 19.07.2015 17:25, Andy Mabbett wrote:
> .. .Another thought occurs to me: we should invite one of the guys 
> dealing with these maps to speak at a SoTM ... 





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