[mashmac2]

I have a colleague who flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's, and said the Soviet civilian maps were just terrible - they'd show roads in the wrong places and didn't show secret military bases, etc. He figured this out after accidentally flying over a Soviet army base in what is today eastern Ukraine... and then talked his East German military connection into getting him a copy of the military maps.

[ommunist]

As a former Soviet geodesist and forest inventory specialist, I must tell that military 1:50 000 maps are extremely accurate. What was intentionally skewed are civil 1:250 000 maps. The highest resolution and the best accuracy have been provided for so called forestry maps (1:10000).

[themodelplumber]

Wow, that's fascinating. Would you happen to have a website somewhere that documents your experiences? I'm really curious.

[n0us]

What would be the motivation for providing more accurate forestry maps?

[dang]

> As a former Soviet geodesist and forest inventory specialist,

Well that takes the cake for the day.

[gleb]

"flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's" does not compute. Soviet Union had a whole branch of military dedicated to anti-aircraft warfare, meant to stop such things.

But yuh, the civilian maps were terrible - as the article describes.

[usaphp]

Why would they show secret military bases on civilian maps for non Russian solders? Sounds reasonable to me, they are secret for a reason, no? Am I missing something?

[PeterisP]

Civilian maps were intentionally distorted. In various places the details were completely wrong - for example, smaller roads near some Baltic coast beaches (e.g. "potential conflict/landing sites") were simply drawn with no relation to reality to fill in the space with something superficially resembling the density of roads but with different angles/locations/everything; the locals knew to not rely on this and for construction/planning purposes you used different maps than the civilians.