Russian Military Topographic Maps
One of my favorite areas of the Herman B Wells Library Map Collection is our collection of Russian military topographic maps of Eastern Europe. The collection contains over 4,000 maps of Eastern Europe that were published by the Russian, and later Soviet militaries from around 1883 through 1947. While Soviet topographic maps from the 1970's and 80's are abundant, our collection contains maps of earlier years and at a more detailed scale. On some of the maps, individual buildings can be clearly seen. The maps were created by the military for internal use and were never meant to be seen by outside eyes. Many of the sheets carry stamps that claim "secret" or "do not distribute", as cartographic Information was held as a close secret by the Russian military during that time. However, in the years surrounding World War II, many were captured in the field by opposing forces, including German and American troops. As a result, myriad stamps from institutions they passed through, such as the University of Berlin, The US Army Map Service, and, the CIA map library, mark the maps with a unique and visual history. As the maps were captured by various opposing forces, each library stamped their maps with their name, allowing us to trace the history of how these maps traveled from Russian and Soviet troops in the field to Bloomington, Indiana. The area covered by the collection includes much of Eastern Europe along the border of what would become the Soviet Union. Changes in political boundaries, war, forced resettlement, and demographic shifts permanently changed Eastern Europe during this time. These maps provide scholars with a unique historical view of the pre-World War II landscape. Because the maps were captured in the field, this means that there are gaps in our collection. IU Libraries received these maps from a cataloging agreement with the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress may have a more complete collection, but their collection is unprocessed. Given that detailed maps of this part of the world are relatively rare for the pre-World War II period, our collection provides researchers with an important tool for studying change over time, as well as locating historical places whose names have changed or that may no longer exist. We were able to digitize this collection thanks to a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources, or CLIR. The "Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship Through Increasing Access to Unique Materials" is a national grant competition for digitizing rare and unique content in collecting institutions. This program is supported by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. We've scanned each of the maps at a high resolution, georeferenced each sheet for use in GIS, and created detailed metadata for each of the 4,000 maps. The maps are richly described as you can see from the numerous metadata fields. Our main goal was to increase discoverability by recording information as printed on the maps, usually in Russian, but also Ukrainian, Finnish, and other languages. We also provide translations in English and transliteration when appropriate. We pay special attention to provenance and location information. We record the information provided by the stamps to document provenance and the various changes in hand. And we also record historical names of city, region, and country of focus, as well as contemporary names. This way, a researcher can get to the maps of interest by searching historical as well as present forms of names. This project would not be possible without funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources, and our amazing team!
View the digitized collection here: Image Collections Online
An interactive index map of the collection is located here: https://iu.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=3003eaf8107048aeabd74b74a1481cb4
For more information:
The Red Atlas by
Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, its legacy and the accompanying Russian-American tension continues to loom large. Russia's access to detailed information on the United States and its allies may not seem so shocking in this day of data clouds and leaks, but long before we had satellite imagery of any neighborhood at a finger's reach, the amount the Soviet government knew about your family's city, street, and even your home would astonish you. Revealing how this was possible, The Red Atlas is the never-before-told story of the most comprehensive mapping endeavor in history and the surprising maps that resulted. From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, and London to towns like Pontiac, MI and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories and ports, or more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet feet on the ground. The Red Atlas includes over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us. A fantastic historical document of an era that sometimes seems less distant, The Red Atlas offers an uncanny view of the world through the eyes of Soviet strategists and spies.
ISBN: 9780226389578Publication Date: 2017-10-17
Mapping Europe's Borderlands by
The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book."Mapping EuropeOCOs Borderlands "takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, Seegel explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. Seegel concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographersOCO regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices.a
ISBN: 0226744272Publication Date: 2012-05-01
