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>I remember a number of years ago reading an old Czech tale about a patrol
>of soldiers out in some mountains in the snow, and getting lost.  They
>panicked, and their leader calmed them by producing a map. They found their
>way to safety and, in the pub, asked to look at this wonderful document.
>He showed them a map of a completely different mountain range than the one
>that they were in.
>
I recall reading a newspaper item about some mountaineers falling down a
cliff in the Ural mountains that was not on the map in Russia right after
the breaking up of the USSR. Deliberate distortion of the geographical
truth seemed to be common pratice in the East Block Socialist Countries. A
very shocking experience I had lately was a map that somehow managed to
reach our institute that represents the actual graveness of the cold war.
It is a town plan of the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands (my city) in a
high graphical quality, printed in many colours. When seen on the wall it
just looks like an ordanary town plan of our city. Only when you look up
close you will notice an important difference: all text elements in the
map, toponyms as well as the marginal information are in the cyrilic
alphabet.  This is a Russian millitary map made for action in the field.
All military installations are plotted to a very high degree of detail in a
conspicuous colour. All measures the topo-service of the Netherlands took
and takes to deny us citizens the knowledge of the location of millitary
objects on topographical maps and aerial photographs becomes a farce
instantly. When one thinks about this map and the fact that a map like this
must exsist (and kept up to date) of all major and minor cities of Europe
we can only guess what size the cartographic effort was that the Soviets
put into getting geographical intelligence of there adversaries. Once again
I, as a cartographer, am confronted with the dilemma in cartography that
advancement in technology and volume of cartographic ouput are in many
cases linked to (potential) warfare. Once the treat of war is over, this
cartographic potential usually shrivels down to trivial sizes.
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Olev Koop                                             E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Cartography Section                             Phone :  +31 30 531379
Faculty of Geographic Sciences          Fax    :   +31 30 540604
Utrecht University
PO Box 80.115
3508 TC Utrecht
The Netherlands
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