N. N. Komedchikov

By this author

The State Map of the USSR on the Scale of 1:1,000,000: History of Creation

Issue 1 from 01.03.2001

The State Map of the USSR on the scale of 1:1.000,000 was the first topographic map to cover the entire territory of the Soviet Union, compiled in accordance with the unified guidelines and using a ficd system of conventional signs. The history of its creation was closely related to the project of compiling the International World Map of the same scale, promoted in Russia by the Imperial Geographical Society.

Russia agreed to compile its sheets of the International Map at the 2nd International Conference on the 1:1,000,000 World Map in Paris. However, the onset of World War I prevented the fulfillment of this agreement, and the work was not to be started until after the October Revolution.It was only in the late 1918 that the Military Topographic Department of the General Headquarters, responding to the initiative of the Russian Geographical Society, started compiling the 1:1,000,000 map of the country with the same sheet numbering and in the same projection as those of the International Map. Its first issues were printed in black to serve as the background for geological maps. Beginning with 1923, the 1:1,000,000 map was compiled as a strategic map for the army. Parallel with that work, in the mid-1920s the civilian Mapping and Geodetic Service started publishing the country’s topographic map of the same scale.By 1935, the military and civilian services had published as many as 107 sheets of the 1:1,000,000 map of the USSR. Following the appearance of new guidelines in that year, the civilian service had to turn to the equidistant conic projection differing from that of the International Map.On February 17, 1940, the Council of People’s Commissars issued the decree “On Publishing the State Map of the USSR,” which ordered both the civilian and military geodetic services to publish the 1:1,000,000 map of the country in 180 sheets, to be compiled in accordance with unified guide lines and issued in 1940—1942.Although the fulfillment of this decree was delayed by the onset of World War II, an intense work on the map went on through all the war years and was completed in 1945. Integrating a great amount of survey and literary data coming from various departments and institutions, the first state map of the USSR was an immense contribution to its further geographical study. The second, completely revised, edition of the map was published in 1952—1958.

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