Soviet maps made available for the first time this week have revealed that Cambridge was mapped by the USSR during the Cold War, in what experts have described as “spine chilling” detail.

From the beginning of the Cold War through to the early 1990s, the Russian military attempted to map the entire world in what was the most ambitious and comprehensive geographical survey in history. The newly released maps, which were dramatically abandoned in Latvian and Estonian train carriages during the collapse of the Soviet Union, cover over 16,000 square kilometres of the UK, including 103 towns.

Soviets knew the depths of rivers and ditches in Cambridge, the weight-bearing potential of bridges and the exact width of streets. The Cambridge Regional War Room RSG-4, a supposedly “secret” military bunker, had been marked out by the Russians for potential use. In effect, according to map expert John Davies, “every Soviet leader from Stalin to Gorbachev knew not only where you lived, but how to get there by tank”.

In the process of compiling the maps Cambridge was made the target of satellite imaging, spy-plane photography and even espionage over 50 years. Local knowledge in the UK was then converted into military mapping in Moscow.

Dr. Hubertus Jahn, a Cambridge historian, explained that “the strategic value of Cambridge is clearly the research institutions and think-tanks that are militarily useful. Departments of Chemistry, Physics, Engineering and so forth can all be utilised for defence purposes. Soviet, and for that matter Western, intelligence are interested in much more than just military installations; they want to be able to strike at sensitive points of the enemy”. The London Stock Exchange is encircled in blue and marked out as a potential target on the Soviet maps. “A hit there would have destabilised the Western economic system as a whole”, he added.

Jahn, who is an expert in twentieth-century Russian history, believes that the maps reveal that the Soviet knowledge of the West was far more comprehensive than vice versa. “In the USSR, geographic knowledge was tightly controlled, as was travelling”, he explained. “You couldn't just go into a shop and buy a good map of Moscow or Novosibirsk. They were hardly ever published. Even today, search engines like Google Map stop at the border of the Russian Federation”.

Whether the USSR had genuine intentions to attack Britain is a matter which has been greatly disputed by experts. John Davies is confident that the released KGB maps demonstrate that “world domination” may have been a genuine aspiration of the Soviet regime. According to Davies, “the purpose of the maps would be to facilitate any proposed invasion, occupation and subsequent command and control of any territory in UK, Europe or world-wide”. But Dr Jahn doubts that the Soviets ever had specific plans to attack the UK. “Mutual deterrence was the key to the Cold War”, Jahn argues, “but defence needs to be pro-active, hence the collection of information, just in case”.

Katherine Faulkner

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