Big Brother was watching us: Soviet mapping of Norway during the Cold War

ABSTRACT

In the early 1990s, it was revealed that during the Cold War the Soviet Union’s General Staff had secretly mapped large parts of the world in great detail. This article discusses Soviet military maps covering Norway, and analyses how the maps were produced and how successfully they depict their subject. The author concludes that the USSR utilised open sources, satellite imagery, and human intelligence when compiling the maps, with varying degrees of success ranging from the successful penetration of Norwegian military secrecy to misidentification of commonly known institutions, which resulted in maps of highly non-uniform quality that were unique in Norwegian mapping history. A further conclusion is that the maps clearly do not represent the full Soviet intelligence repository on Norwegian topography, and the author discusses some possible theories for their unexpectedly low quality and reasons why they were perceived as vastly superior when first discovered.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War
• map history
• military maps
• Norway
• USSR

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.