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Comment from pangoSE on 8 January 2020 at 09:04

url renders an error

Comment from apm-wa on 8 January 2020 at 12:58

It just opened for me with no problem. Please try again.

Comment from saintam1 on 8 January 2020 at 17:31

Worked for me. Insightful review, thanks!

Comment from SK53 on 8 January 2020 at 20:07

Definitely need a copy. The Soviet’s weren’t completely wrong about Mechanics Institutes, several universities in the UK have their antecedents in such institutions, although certainly today they are fulfil primarily social purposes (and probably not for the working class).

Of course there are many other detailed maps of various parts of the world which remain protected by official secrets. One aspect of getting involved in OSM is how many people turn out to have some involvement with formal map surveying or cartography (a naturalist friend, my cousin’s husband, a couple of friends of my father), so it wasn’t just the Soviets who had lots of them.

Comment from imagico on 9 January 2020 at 13:04

In a way the Soviet military maps were a predecessor of OSM in that they were one of the most notable and extensive earlier attempts for recording a detailed cartographic account of the world wide geography to a uniform standard. There were earlier and less extensive attempts at that - like US mapping campaigns during WW2 but nothing to the extent of the Soviet military mapping program. That they have copied information from local maps for that IMO does not really diminish this important innovation.

Even today the cartography of the larger scale maps is an important inspiration for anyone who attempts to display the variety of world wide geography in a common cartographic design. I can recommend studying the map key of the Soviet maps - an early version is available on

https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/pdf/soviet.pdf

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