I have a colleague who flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's, and said the Soviet civilian maps were just terrible - they'd show roads in the wrong places and didn't show secret military bases, etc. He figured this out after accidentally flying over a Soviet army base in what is today eastern Ukraine... and then talked his East German military connection into getting him a copy of the military maps.
As a former Soviet geodesist and forest inventory specialist, I must tell that military 1:50 000 maps are extremely accurate. What was intentionally skewed are civil 1:250 000 maps. The highest resolution and the best accuracy have been provided for so called forestry maps (1:10000).
With all respect, I have to redirect you to public libraries in Russia or for example Latvia. There was no Internet before 1991. Easy prey is 1: 2 500 000 school political atlas of 1980. There is no city of Daugavpils on the map of Latvia (2nd largest in Latvia), but smaller towns are mapped. Why? Daugavpils was military important.
Well, over here at 1:20 000 000 Lithuania has small Klaipeda, but Latvia has no Daugavpils. http://goo.gl/f2ABiy . It has another explanation when relates to 1:20M (ports depicted for small republics). But in my school atlas of the 9th form my home city was absent too on a larger scale map. Also example - Lithiania has Klaipeda, Latvia has Liepaja, Russia has Velikiye Luki (rather small one), Belarus has Vitebsk, but no Daugavpils in Latvia too - http://goo.gl/VoGtvl.
Actually I keep aset of Soviet military maps for Afghanistan. If you are interested, We can make some field experiments if you are ready to get to Bagram with Trimble GPS. It is now controlled by USAF, so you can feel certainly protected.
Ah, sorry, I was more interested in your biographical experiences, not so much the topographical details. :-) It's just that I don't know many who have had a job like yours, and in USSR.
since I made these, I can answer. You have to accurately account boundaries of forest lots in order to correctly perform operations there. Every lot had individual economic purpose and program of development. There were 10-year plans, so basically every 10 years you produce a new set of maps.
"flew relief aid missions into Russia in the 70's and 80's" does not compute. Soviet Union had a whole branch of military dedicated to anti-aircraft warfare, meant to stop such things.
But yuh, the civilian maps were terrible - as the article describes.
Why would they show secret military bases on civilian maps for non Russian solders? Sounds reasonable to me, they are secret for a reason, no? Am I missing something?
Civilian maps were intentionally distorted. In various places the details were completely wrong - for example, smaller roads near some Baltic coast beaches (e.g. "potential conflict/landing sites") were simply drawn with no relation to reality to fill in the space with something superficially resembling the density of roads but with different angles/locations/everything; the locals knew to not rely on this and for construction/planning purposes you used different maps than the civilians.
