Every military and intelligence outfit has their own mapping unit why is this exactly surprising?

The only reason why these maps gathered any attention is that funny enough they were actually use by some western companies as they were effectively either very cheap or without any royalties at all while most western maps are a copyright hell that would cost you a fortune to even look at.

The article also seems to glance over a lot of the inaccuracies that ended up in the soviet maps including made up places from movies and other popular culture.

I’m reading a book, “The Great Game”, about the 18th century geopolitical competition between Russia and the UK to control swaths of Central Asia. A good portion of the book is just explaining the dates and destinations of secret expeditions, which were dedicated to mapping terrains and scouting rivers.

When it comes to topographic maps of Kashmir the USSR maps have been cheaper (and outdated). The indian government keeps their maps secret.

Most governments keep their most accurate maps secret, especially maps that include terrain and soil traversability information.

A while ago, maybe the 80s, I remember reading something like a magazine article about a reporter visiting the Soviet Union for some human interest story or similar. Soviet cities were notorious for not having useful maps available. Somehow the reporter knew a US military attache and he said not to worry, he'd bring along his own maps and everything was easy. It made sense to me at the time, but now I wonder how available such US military maps were to visiting friends. Maybe the US version of the consumer city map was so non-strategic that they were easily available.

>Soviet cities were notorious for not having useful maps available.

This article expands on this topic. Surprising!

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-m...

I bought the book associated with this post (absolutely beautiful and well-made book), and in it they mention that only civilian maps made available to Soviet citizens were purposefully nerfed, but that many Western civilian maps of Soviet cities borrowed data from easily-available Western military maps, so that if you were to somehow buy a map of Moscow at some civilian gas station in Rome (this is my own example to paraphrase), it would have been fairly accurate, and loads more accurate than the maps available to civilians in the Soviet Union.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15378422

For those interested in finding maps, the book's author has published https://www.sovietmaps.com/resources

The links are dead on the site, FYI.

Talk about a ton of effort that would quickly be obsolete.

Infrastructure like roads tend to not change that regularly and once it's built it's there and won't change for quite a few years. They might be missing newer roads but knowing about a portion of the roads would still be useful for planning movement and logistics even if there might be a newer better route.

...down to the heights of houses and types of businesses. Google street view can't even keep up with this.

Street view, no. Google Earth Pro, yes. And that's free.