The Soviet Military secretly mapped the entire world, but few outsiders have seen the maps—until now.

Given the technology of the time, the Soviet maps are incredibly accurate. Even today, the US State Department uses them (among other sources) to place international boundary lines on official government maps.

Guy’s company, Omnimap, was one of the first to import Soviet military maps to the West. But he wasn’t alone. Like the military officials charged with guarding the maps, map dealers around the world saw an opportunity. Maps that were once so secret that an officer who lost one could be sent to prison (or worse) were bought by the ton and resold for a profit to governments, telecommunications companies, and others.

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A retired British software developer named John Davies, has been working to change that. For the past 10 years he’s been investigating the Soviet maps, especially the ones of British and American cities. He’s had some help, from a military map librarian, a retired surgeon, and a young geographer, all of whom discovered the maps independently. They’ve been trying to piece together how they were made and how, exactly, they were intended to be used. The maps are still a taboo topic in Russia today, so it’s impossible to know for sure, but what they’re finding suggests that the Soviet military maps were far more than an invasion plan. Rather, they were a framework for organizing much of what the Soviets knew about the world, almost like a mashup of Google Maps and Wikipedia, built from paper.

Davies has probably spent more time studying the Soviet maps than anyone else. An energetic widower in his early 70s, he has hundreds of paper maps and thousands of digital copies at his house in northeast London, and he maintains a comprehensive website about them.