Authors

Alexander James Kent¹;  ¹ Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

Discussion

From its origins in supporting the Red Army’s advance to Berlin, the Soviet military cartographic programme involved the mapping of over 2,000 towns and cities beyond the USSR in street-level detail. Their subjects range from major population centres, such as London, New York, Sydney and Tokyo, to smaller settlements of limited strategic interest. Their cartographic symbology evolved during the Cold War to address the challenges of portraying a global diversity of urban and rural environments. Yet, the ongoing requirement for standardisation and completeness required the effective identification, classification and portrayal of topographic features by cartographers who were culturally and politically – as well as geographically – isolated from their subject. This paper explores these challenges by examining two successive editions of the Soviet city plan of Cambridge (UK) that were produced by military cartographers in 1977 and 1989. It discusses how the interpretation and portrayal of this foreign built environment reflected Soviet conceptualisations of urban space. Consequently, the paper suggests how the plans – and perhaps the Soviet global military mapping endeavour as a whole – formed a state-driven cartographic rewriting of space and place for the purposes of constructing an imagined, if never realised, Soviet future.