In the past few years a variety of Soviet military-produced
topographic map sets have become available. We are the world leader in the supply of these maps. These high quality
sets cover all of the former USSR, plus numerous other countries
around the world. In many cases, such as North Korea, China,
Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, these map sets are the only
topographic materials available at scales larger than the 1:500,000
DMA TPC charts. These maps are all produced by the military,
for their own use, and were not intended for release to the public.
All of the maps are classified "Top Secret" (typically
sheets printed prior to 1988) or "For official use"
(typically sheets printed after 1988). These sheets are free
of the "inaccuracies" commonly found on civilian editions.
There are five different series available; 1:500,000;
1:200,000; 1:100,000; 1:50,000; and 1:10,000 city maps. All of
the series are true topographic maps, and since the maps were
designed for military use, include information not always found
on topographic maps from socialist or communist countries. For
instance these maps include power lines with the maximum carrying
capacity; oil, gas, and water pipelines with the number of pipes
per line and the diameter of the pipe; stream flow measurements;
and forestry information such as density of trees and average
diameters of tree trunks.
In particular the 1:200,000 series includes about
2-3 pages of printed information on the reverse of each sheet.
The information covers such topics as Populated Points; Road Network;
Relief and Soils; Hydrography; Regime; Vegetation; and Climatic
Conditions. The information listed on each sheet varies with
the country covered and the terrane, but in nearly all cases the
information is extensive and detailed. A few of the country sets
lack this information, in particular the sheets older than the
early 1970's, and some of the African country sets. For instance,
the Egyptian sheets contain this added information only on the
sheets along the coastline.
Access to these maps varies weekly and often certain
sets are not available. We try to stock many of the sets, particularly
the 1:200,000 sets, but please check on stock status if you have
an urgent request. Certain sets, such as eastern USSR 1:50,000
and China 1:200,00 and 1:100,000 sets are not stocked and special-order
sets only.
We can supply digital versions of any soviet military map. These are available as raster scans, DEMs, or multi-layer vector maps. Please call us with your needs.
