Using GIS and historical digitized aerial imagery and maps to analyze information on Cold War Soviet military maps of Denmark

摘要

During the Cold War, the General Staff of the Soviet Union secretly mappedforeign countries for military purposes. As the material was unavailable to scholars beforethe fall of the Soviet Union, research into the cartographic heritage of this global mappingenterprise has only emerged in recent years. The geographical information contained inthe maps was based on a wide range of sources, among them remote sensing, existingtopographical maps and even information collected by intelligence officers in the field(Davies and Kent 2017). Davies and Kent have carried out pioneering work on the Sovietpractice of mapping, but mostly based on material from the United States and the UnitedKingdom. Following the research agenda set by them, this paper presents an initialanalysis of the Soviet military mapping of Denmark based on the collection of Sovietmaps held by the Royal Danish Library. We focus on identifying information sourcesused in production, as well as assessing the general cartographic quality of the maps. Ourapproach is a GIS-based investigation of the origin of the topographical information onSoviet military maps, utilizing an extensive collection of more than one million geolocatedhistorical aerial photographs along with a collection of digitized topographicalmaps covering all of Denmark throughout the period of study. The method consists of thefollowing steps: (1) Scanning and geo-referencing of the Soviet military maps, (2) guidedselection of areas/map sheets to be included in the analysis, (3) examination of thegeometric, positional and thematic accuracy of Soviet map objects, and (4) an assessmentof the quality of information in the Soviet maps based on contemporary aerial imageryand possible identification of the source of information used in the maps.