Four hundred tons of secret maps

While wandering through Riga, we stumble upon a map shop tucked inside the former Berga Bazārs arcade. At first glance, it looks simply like a good shop, offering a solid selection of international maps and travel guides.

But then we discover the shelf of Russian maps, which seem to chart worlds that barely exist. An atlas of the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan, Stalin’s “anti-Israel” along the Amur River, where today only one percent of the population is Jewish, yet a Yiddish newspaper is still published and Yiddish remains a mandatory subject in elementary schools. A map for navigating around Lake Ladoga, where just reaching it feels harder than getting to the Moon. An atlas for the residents of Murmansk, where during World War I even Hungarians could easily reach on free train tickets – they only needed to build the railway first.

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

The real surprise, however, comes afterward. It isn’t until we reach the counter to pay that we notice the piles of map sheets stacked from floor to ceiling behind the clerk – and the trilingual sign declaring them strictly confidential topographic maps of the Soviet Army.

We take a closer look. Four 1:500,000 sheets cover Hungary, but there are 1:25,000 sheets for the major cities. Written in Cyrillic, the city names sound exactly like the way old Red Army veterans I once met across the former USSR pronounced them. Curiosity leads me to search for the former Soviet military airfield in Mátyásföld, which I knew during its operational days, and which turned out to have been staffed by Georgian officers after the Soviets withdrew. Yet the detailed Будапешт map still hides the airfield even from their own officers – it’s marked as farmland.

The shop clerk, enjoying our enthusiasm, shows us a detailed map sheet of Washington, D.C., with the Pentagon and the White House, where every facility is color-coded by function and by population density. It turns out that the Soviet Army had produced and updated similarly detailed maps of every part of the world that interested them, at least once a decade.

“How did you lay hands on this material?” I ask, tactlessly, but the clerk answers eagerly. He explains that the shop owner had been a civilian employee in the Soviet Army in Latvia in 1992, during their withdrawal, and learned that the top-secret maps were to be handed over to a paper mill for destruction by higher orders. He immediately began negotiating with the responsible officer to purchase at least the most interesting sheets. The army initially refused, but a week later they demanded $14,000 for the material. The owner obtained the money – “don’t ask how,” the clerk adds – and went to the warehouse for the shipment. The warehouse workers were too lazy to sort the sheets and told him to take it all. He shipped four hundred tons of map sheets in several train cars – and still has plenty of each. Except for San Francisco, the clerk adds, because someone from there once discovered the shop and wrote an article about it. Locals bought up the sheets like candy, and now even Washington sheets are scarce.

As a final flourish, a group of six or seven young Americans enters the shop. They are looking for a map sheet of South Carolina, the city of Greenville. When they get it, their jaws drop. “Oh my God, here’s our lake house!” screams one girl. “And here’s our church!” They immediately buy two copies. “Shouldn’t it be four? How many more do you have?” “Seventy-one more.”

The group leader explains that they volunteer at a local Latvian scout camp; the others are first-timers, he has been there multiple times. “And how did you find this shop?” “A friend told me I absolutely had to come here, because OMG, you wouldn’t believe the material!”

It is truly astonishing, bizarre, and slightly oppressive to see so plainly how avidly the Soviet Army – and by extension the state that controlled it – kept track of the parts of the world they cared about. It provides a tiny psychological footnote to the Russian state’s current insatiable appetite for information.

Just for the souvenir, we buy the 1989 Hungarian sheet including Budapest (yes, even at that time, before the withdrawal, it was still updated!) along with a solid reference book: The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union secretly mapped the world, 2017. Only after leaving the shop do I realize I never checked how they represented, if at all, the Soviet barracks at Hajmáskér and the surrounding training grounds in the Bakony hills, where I trained on tanks. I will have to go back for that.