Four hundred tons of secret maps

While walking around Riga, we accidentally come across a map shop in the former Berga Bazārs passage. At first glance, it simply looks like a good shop, with a good selection of international maps and guidebooks.

But then we discover the shelf of Russian maps, which looks as though it offers detailed maps of non-existent worlds. An atlas of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, Stalin’s anti-Israel along the Amur, where only one percent of Jews live today, but they still publish a Yiddish-language newspaper, and learning Yiddish is mandatory in elementary school. A map for getting around Lake Ladoga, when only getting there is harder than getting to the Moon. An atlas for the residents of Murmansk, where it was not difficult to get with a free train ticket for Hungarians during WWI, they just had to build the railway.

Prokudin-Gorsky: Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war on the construction of the Murmansk railway (the “Murmelbahn”)

But the real fun is yet to come. It is only when we pay that we notice the infinte stacks of map sections standing from floor to ceiling behind the counter with the trilingual inscription that these are top secret topographic maps of the Soviet Army.

We look inside. Hungary is covered by four 1:500,000 secitons, but there are also 1:25,000 maps of larger cities. Our city names written in Cyrillic letters sound like when I hear them from old men all over the former Soviet Union who once served in the occupying Red Army. Out of curiosity, I look for the former Soviet military airport in Mátyásföld, east of Budapest, which I knew when it was still operating, and which after their withdrawal turned out to have been manned by Georgian officers. However, the detailed map of Budapest hides the existence of the airport even from their own officers: it marks arable lands in its place.

The shop boy, enjoying our enthusiasm, also shows us a detailed map of Washington D.C. with the Pentagon and the White House, where each facility is marked with a different color according to its function and population density. It turns out that the Soviet army was creating similarly detailed maps of the entire world they were interested in and updating them at least every decade.

“How did you lay hands on this material?” I ask the tactless question, but the boy answers readily. He tells us that in 1992, during the Soviet army’s withdrawal from Latvia, the owner of this shop worked with them as a civilian employee, and he heard about the secret map material being handed over to the paper factory for destruction. He immedietaly began negotiating with the responsible comrade in order to purchase at least the most interesting sections. The army at first refused, then, a week later, they asked $14,000 for the material they wanted. Our man got the money – don’t ask how, the boy adds –, and went to the warehouse to get the goods. However, the warehousemen were too lazy to sort out the requested sections, and told him to take it all. He transported from there four hundred tons of map sections in several railroad wagons, and there is still plenty of them today. Except for San Francisco, the boy adds, because someone from there once discovered the shop and wrote an article about it. After that, the locals bought up all their sections like hotcakes. There is already a shortage of Washington, too.

At about the final words, a group of six or seven young Americans enter the shop. They are looking for a section of South Carolina, the city of Greenville. They get it and their jaws drop. “Oh my God, here’s our lakeside cottage”, one of the girls screams. “Here’s our church!” They immediately buy two copies. “Shouldn’t we have four? How many more of this are left?” “Seventy-one more.”

The leader of the group explains that they are helping out at a local Latvian scout camp, the others for the first time, but he has been coming back. “And how did you find this shop?” “A friend of mine had been here and he said I absolutely must check it out, because OMG, what material is there here!”

It’s truly amazing, bizarre and depressing to see so clearly the appetite with which the Soviet army and, of course, the Soviet state that controlled it, kept track of the part of the world they were interested in. And it’s a little psychological background addition to the current insatiable appetite of the Russian state.

Just for the sake of a souvenir, we buy the 1989 edition of the Hungarian section including Budapest (yes, it was still updated then, immediately before their withdrawal!), as well as a good reference book: The Red Atlas. How the Soviet Union secretly mapped the world, 2017. Only after leaving the store I recall that I didn’t check out how the Soviet barracks in the Western Hungarian Hajmáskér and the surrounding Soviet firing range in the Bakony mountains where we practiced so much when I was a tank driver, were depicted, if at all. I have to go back and check it.